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Hello everyone. Welcome to the LangFocus channel, and my name is Paul.
Today, we're going to compare two languages that are closely related to each other and similar in many ways,
but also quite different from each other, with limited mutual intelligibility.
I'm talking about two non-Indo-European languages of northern Europe: Finnish and Estonian.
Finnish and Estonian are both members of the Finnic group of languages, along with Karelian, Ludic, Veps,
Ingrian, Votic, and Livonian.
Their most recent common ancestor language was Late Proto Finnic, around 2,000 years ago.
Finnic is a branch of the Uralic language family. So, they are both more distantly related to Hungarian, as well.
Since Finnish and Estonian have been developing in different directions for 2000 years,
they are now fairly different, with Estonian being much more innovative, while Finnish is more conservative.
In other words, Estonian has changed more. They're not mutually intelligible—for the most part—aside from basic general vocabulary.
Estonian speakers generally understand Finnish better than Finnish speakers understand
Estonian because of exposure to Finnish media. Though I understand that this is much less the case among the young generations today.
Let's look at a few common phrases in either language and see what's similar and what's different about them.
"Hello" in Finnish: "Hei", and in Estonian: "Tere" or "Tervist."
This word literally means "health."
The "t" here is a partitive case inflection.
Partitive is the case used for direct objects when they are partial objects, rather than complete ones.
"Tere" is a contraction of "Tervist,"
but Finnish also has the formal word "Terve" for "Hello," which literally means "healthy."
This is a cognate with the Estonian word "tervist," except "terve" is an adjective, rather than a noun.
In Estonian, "Tere" is used with many greetings, while in Finnish, "Hyvää" is used.
Estonian has a cognate of this word, "hea." They both mean "good."
Good morning in Finnish: "Hyvää huomenta."
This noun is in the partitive case and is a literary word from "morning" in Finnish.
In Estonian: "Tere hommikust." Here you can see that these two words are cognates, and both come from Proto Finnic: "hoomen,"
but the Estonian word is in the elative case, which is used with the sense of "from" or "out of."
"Good day"
or "good afternoon" in Finnish: "Hyvää päivää," and in Estonian: "Tere päevast." Again, here
you can see that these two words are cognates. These cognates reveal an important difference between Finnish and Estonian.
Finnish uses vowel harmony while Estonian no longer uses vowel harmony,
except in some archaic expressions. In Finnish,
there are three classes of vowels: front vowels, neutral vowels, and back vowels.
If a word contains front vowels, it cannot contain back vowels, and vice versa. This also applies to the word suffixes: "päivää."
This is a front vowel. So, aside from this neutral vowel, the other vowel is also a front vowel.
"päevast": here, we see a front vowel and a neutral vowel, but there's a back vowel in the suffix.
This word doesn't exhibit the same vowel harmony as the Finnish word.
But, it's worth noting that vowel harmony may be seen in southern Estonian dialects.
"Good evening" in Finnish: "Hyvää iltaa", and in Estonian: "Tere õhtust."
In this case, these phrases contain no cognate words.
"What's your name?" in Finnish: "Mikä sinun nimesi on?" Word-for-word: "What your name is?"
"Sinun" is the genitive inflection of the personal pronoun "sinä."
"Sinun" also has a short form that is used in informal speech: "sun":
"Mikä sun nimes on?"
In Estonian: "Mis sinu nimi on?"
Just like in Finnish, Estonian also has a short form of the genitive pronoun:
"Mis su nimi on?" Whether we use the long forms or the short forms,
you can see that the Finnish and Estonian sentences are pretty close to each other. One difference is the word for "what."
Another difference is the form of the word for "name." In Finnish,
the basic nominative form is "nimi," like in Estonian.
But in Finnish, there are special possessive forms of the nominative. When there's a genitive pronoun to show possession, a
corresponding possessive suffix is added to the end of the noun. And in this case, it changes the final vowel, though that doesn't always happen.
The full suffix, "~si," is used in formal written Finnish, while a shortened suffix is usually used in spoken Finnish. Or, the
suffix is dropped: "Mikä sun nimi on?" When the suffix is dropped, it's more like the Estonian sentence.
Possessive suffixes disappeared from Estonian in the 17th century.
So, whereas in Finnish, you can say a possessive sentence without the genitive personal pronoun, in Estonian,
you need it. For example, in the sentences meaning "My name is ______." in Finnish: "Nimeni on ______."
Here, there's no genitive pronoun, but there's a possessive suffix.
In Estonian: "Minu nimi on _____." Here, there's a genitive pronoun, but there's no possessive suffix.
False friends: so far we've seen that some words are different
and other words are cognates, while those cognates often have different forms or different inflectional forms.
But, as with most languages that are closely related to each other, there are also some false friends- cognates that look and sound similar
but actually have different meanings. For example, in Finnish:
"koristaa" means "to decorate."
The Estonian word "koristama" means "to clean." The core meaning of these words is "to make beautiful,"
so you can see how that developed into both of their present meanings. In Finnish,
"maja" means a "shelter", or a "tree house". And in Estonian, "maja" is the regular word for "house."
The Finnish word "huone" means a "room" the Estonian word
"hoone" means a big building. The Finnish word
"hytii" means a "cabin," but a cabin on a boat. The Estonian word "hütt"
means a "hut", or a "shack."
Both of these words are Germanic loan words, the Finnish one from Swedish, and the Estonian one from Old High German.
The Finnish word "raamattu" means "Bible." The Estonian word "raamat"
means "book." The word for "book" in Finnish is "kirja," and the word for "Bible" in Estonian is "Piibel."
Finnish is much more conservative in its vocabulary,
meaning that there have been strong efforts to use Finnish words or coin new words from Finnish roots
instead of adopting loan words for modern objects and concepts. For example, in Estonian,
the word for "telephone" is "telefon." Finnish had the word "telefoni," but replaced it with for "puhelin."
Estonian contains many loan words,
especially from Middle Low German and German.
Finnish sticks to its Finnish roots for most of these. The word for "kitchen" in Finnish "keittiö."
And in Estonian: "köök." The Finnish word was coined in the 19th century from the word meaning "to cook,"
plus a suffix that forms nouns from verbs. The Estonian word comes from Middle Low German.
Where Finnish does use loan words, they're often from Swedish, as we saw in a previous pair of false friends.
Another example is the words for "doctor." In Finnish:
"lääkäri," which comes from Swedish. And in Estonian "arst," which comes from Middle Low German.
Grammar:
Finnish and Estonian have many grammatical features in common. Both Finnish and Estonian are synthetic languages.
That means that meaning can be added to a sentence by adding additional
morphemes to a word, rather than adding additional words. Both have a combination of
agglutinating and fusional elements, though Estonian has become somewhat less synthetic with the loss of some inflectional affixes,
like the loss of the possessive suffixes we saw before.
Another example is that Estonian verbs—in their negative
conjugation—have no affixes showing person, making subject pronouns necessary, unlike in Finnish.
Neither language has grammatical gender. There are no masculine-feminine-neuter distinctions.
Neither language has articles, like "the" or "a" in English.
For example, in Finnish "talo" means either "the house" or "a house." And also in Estonian: "maja"
means either "the house" or "a house."
Both Finnish and Estonian have both prepositions and postpositions.
Neither language has a separate future tense. The simple present is also used for the future.
For example, these sentences can mean either "I study English" or "I will study English." In Finnish: "Opiskelen englantia."
And in Estonian: "Ma õpin inglise keelt."
But the Estonian sentence actually needs some more
context in order to be interpreted as future tense. If you add an adverb of time, like "tomorrow," then we'll know it's future tense,
rather than present tense: “Homme õpin inglise keelt.” Without that context, the word
"hakkan" could be used to indicate the future.
It literally means "start," but is used like "going to" in English: “Ma hakkan inglise keelt õppima."
Finnish and Estonian have similar case systems. Finnish has 15 cases. while Estonian has 14. Though
there are two others that are sometimes included, as well.
There's no accusative case on the Estonian list,
but as in Finnish, the accusative form is the same as either the nominative or the genitive form.
Grammatical differences:
The inflections are different between the languages, of course. We saw some examples of that before in verb conjugations and in case inflections.
Estonian syntax has some influence from Low German and German. For example, Estonian often uses postpositions,
whereas in Finnish, a case would be used.
For example, the phrase meaning "on the table" in Finnish: "Pöydalla."
and in Estonian: "laua peal."
The Finnish noun is in the addessive case, which gives the meaning of "on" or "at." In Estonian,
there's a separate word, a postposition, meaning "on."
In Finnish, subject pronouns are normally left out for the first and second person, except for emphasis,
but the third person is required; that's in the written formal language. In casual speech, the pronouns are normally used, though not always.
In Estonian, they're more often left out in casual speech. For example, these sentences mean "I read (past tense) a book." First, in formal
Finnish: "(Minä) luin kirjan" and in informal Finnish: "Mä luin kirjan." And in Estonian, with the pronoun:
"Ma lugesin raamatu läbi.” And without the pronoun: “Lugesin raamatu läbi.” While in Finnish the use of the pronoun
depends more on the register—with the pronoun
normally dropped in formal/written Finnish but included in spoken Finnish—in Estonian, the use of the pronoun doesn't really depend on the register.
It's normal to either use or drop the pronoun in both formal/written and spoken Estonian. One other difference here
is that an Estonian, the word "läbi" is necessary because the object here is a whole object, like the accusative case,
it adds the meaning of "through," like "I read through the whole book."
This word would be unnecessary if the noun was in the partitive case, referring to only part of the book.
Next, we're going to simply dive into some sentences and see what we find. These sentences mean:
"I study literature in university." In Finnish: "Mä opiskelen kirjallisuutta yliopistos."
"I | I study | literature | in university." And in Estonian: "Õpin ülikoolis kirjandust." Word for word,
it's: "I study | in university | literature."
First, notice that the Finnish sentence contains a subject pronoun, while the Estonian sentence doesn't.
Remember that in either language,
people can use or drop the pronoun, but in speech it's normally used in Finnish, while it's more often dropped in spoken Estonian.
Next, we see a pair of cognates, meaning "study": "opiskelen" (Finnish), "Õpin" (Estonian)
There's an interesting difference here. The Finnish verb has a suffix that makes it frequentative,
meaning it shows a repeated action. It changes the meaning of the verb from "learn" to "study."
But if we remove the suffix, it's a lot more like the Estonian word: "opin"
The Estonian word can be used as it is, with the meaning of "study," even though it also means "learn."
Next, the words for "literature" are cognates.
Both are in the partitive case, the case used for partial direct objects. In this case,
the person doesn't study literature and all its entirety. That would be impossible. The person studies only part of the literature available,
so the partitive case is used. But, obviously, even though the same case is used in both languages, the inflectional forms are rather different.
Next, the words for "university" are different, though
both are in the inessive case, which adds the meaning of "in."
Note that the inflection of the Finnish word is an abbreviated colloquial form.
It matches the informality of the sentence, shown by the short pronoun.
And, one more sentence: "If you drove more slowly, I would be able to read the map."
In Finnish: "Jos ajaisit hitaammin, niin pystyisin lukemaan karttaa."
Word-for-word, it's:
"If | you would drive | more slowly | then | I would be able to | read | map." And in Estonian:
"Kui sa aeglasemalt sõidaksid, saaksin kaarti lugeda." Word-for-word, it's:
"If | you | more slowly | you would drive | I would be able to | map | read."
First, we see different words meaning "if."
Here, Finnish has no pronoun. Which tells us this is likely more formal Finnish. In Estonian,
the pronoun is present, which is common in both formal and informal registers. Next,
we see two different verbs meaning drive, but both are in the second person singular conditional.
I'm sure you notice the difference in word order.
This is interesting because in Estonian, the verb comes at the end of the if-clause.
This likely shows the influence of Low German or Old High German. In German and Low German,
the conjugated verb comes at the end of subordinate clauses, of which if-clauses are one type.
If we skip ahead to the second part of this—the main clause—we also see word order that looks Germanic.
The auxiliary verb is at the beginning, and the lexical verb comes at the end of the clause.
The auxiliary verb is not in second position, as in German or Low German, because the subject pronoun is dropped here.
But, we did see that word order before in this sentence: “Ma hakkan inglise keelt õppima.”
Here, the conjugated verb is in the second position, and the second verb comes at the end, as in German or Low German.
Next, we see two different comparative adverbs meaning "more slowly." In Finnish, adverbs are formed by adding
"sti" to the inflecting form of the adjective. Then, to form the comparative adverb, "sti" is replaced by "mmin."
In Estonian, the stem of adverbs is the genitive singular form of the adjective. To that,
we add the suffix "lt" (LT). Then to make the adverb comparative, you remove that ending and add "malt."
Next, in the finished sentence, we see "niin," meaning "then," to show the outcome of a condition.
But in Estonian, it's not used. There is a word that can be used "siis," which serves the same function,
but the sentence is fine without it. In Finnish,
It's better to include the word "niin," and the sentence would sound a bit strange without it.
Next, we see two different verbs meaning "I would be able to." Both are in the first person singular conditional mood.
Next, we have two cognate verbs meaning "to read," but these two verbs reveal a grammatical difference between Finnish and Estonian.
The Finnish verb is a third active infinitive in the elated case. Finnish has 5 different infinitive forms
And this one is used in verb chains like this.
Estonian has only two types of infinitive: the "ma" infinitive and the "da" infinitive.
This one is the "da" infinitive. The "da" infinitive is used when something may or may not actually occur,
whereas the "ma" infinitive is used for things that are certain. The "da" infinitive is used in sentences
meaning things like "she can," or "he may," or "we want," etc., because the action is not certain.
And after that, we have cognate words for "map," both in the partitive case, but with different inflectional forms.
As you can see, Finnish and Estonian
function very similarly, and their shared roots are obvious, but it's also obvious that they split off from each other a very long time ago.
Estonian is, by far, the more innovative language and readily open to changes, while Finnish is much more conservative,
at least standard Finnish. If we introduced Finnish dialects into the comparison, there might be more similarities with Estonian.
Standard Estonian was based more on Northern Estonian dialects as they were spoken, whereas standard Finnish was based more on
conservative forms that were common to all, or most, Finnish dialects. The question of the day: For speakers of Finnish and Estonian:
How well do you understand the other language? Do you think exposure to the other language would be enough to get used to it and understand it?
For other people: What's your impression of these two languages?
How similar do they seem to you?
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