It’s funny how some train of reasoning one casually embarks on can reveal major connections between languages that one should have noticed from the start years ago. While thinking yesterday of the Mari lüštaš ‘to milk’, I realized that it couldn’t be descended from the Proto-Uralic root lüps- as it is, because ps > št [...]
Though they may not be of any real value, texts written in proto-languages make for fun reading. The study of the Uralic languages doesn’t have anything like Schleicher’s fable, but there’s at least this bit by Janne Saarikivi: ― Muna ki̮nta-uralan śarnaja wolem. Ken tuna wolet? ― Muna si̮xmi̮ käxlen śarnaja wolem. Muna tunem ki̮nta-uralam. [...]
I don’t recall the issue being so clearly explained in any of my initial readings, but it seems clear that the appearance of h is constrained in most of the Baltic Finnic languages. One notes that Baltic Finnic has h from pre-consonantal *k in a number of common words, such as Finnish lähteä ‘to leave’ [...]
Continuing on from my last post on the difficulties of learning colloquial Finnish, I thought it might be helpful to summarize how various introductory materials for English speakers handle the divide between the literary standard and popular speech. Leila White, From Start to Finnish (Helsinki: Finn Lectura, 2003). Teaches the standard language only. In the [...]
My last several posts on Finnish textbooks have gotten some traffic from people doing web searches for Finnish learning materials. Since there’s people out there in need of guidance, I’d like to write something to make people aware of the immense gap between the standard Finnish of textbooks and what one will hear on the [...]
Whitney, Arthur M. Teach Yourself Finnish (London: English Universities Press, 1954). It’s amazing how long it took textbook authors to realize that the most effective way to teach a modern language would be to equip the reader with how to handle himself in common everyday situations. The first incarnation of Teach Yourself Finnish, written by [...]
Austerlitz, Robert. Finnish Reader and Glossary (The Hague: Mouton & Co., 1963). Routledge printing 1997, ISBN 0700708154. Nowadays, a foreigner wishing to learn Finnish can choose from any number of well-designed courses, whether for classroom use or self-study, in print or on DVD, but it wasn’t always this way. Until just a couple of decades [...]
As recently announced on Finnish linguistic lists, the Research Institute for the Languages of Finland has published a new publicly accessible database. Evita contains references to linguistic literature dealing with the origins of Finnish words, from 1966 to the turn of the 21st century. Jussi Ylikoski announces the birth of the electronic version of the [...]
The Sami-titled Festschrift for Pekka Sammallahti Sámit, sánit, sátnehámit. Riepmočála Pekka Sammallahtii miessemánu 21. beaivve 2007, published last spring as Mémoires de la Société Finno-Ougrienne 253, is now available online. There are a number of interesting papers here, published in Sami, German, Finnish or English. One of them in particular, Juha Janhunen’s ‘The primary laryngeal [...]
In the Introduction to the Study of the Finno-Ugrian Languages course that I’m sitting in on again this year, the lecturer handed out a nice concise listing of similarities between Hungarian and Mansi—and differences between these two and Finnish—that show why traditionally Hungarian is grouped closely with the Ob-Ugrian languages. Hungarian Mansi Finnish hal xuul [...]