Day 25 — Finland; and its head-scratching language.

Hello 👋. I’m Yuri, and I manage the Engineering Talent Acquisition team at HENNGE. Not sure how to spend this EOY holiday, I decided to visit a friend in Finland (very unwise, I know).

After agonizing days of getting all the necessary documents, neurotically checking the border updates of both Finland and Japan while occasionally biting my thumb, going back and forth between canceling the whole trip and paying the (enormous!) cancellation fee or just YOLO it, I finally landed in Helsinki last Dec 19.

The weather has been ungodly (it got to -16ºC, ICYW) but we can write another story about it. What I want to talk about is their language.

Can you tell which is which?

This is not my first encounter with the Finnish language. My friend used to live in Japan and has been a part-time teacher at italki; so I’ve heard him talking to his students in Finnish before. The first time I heard it, I was gobsmacked. Not only have I never heard the language before, I couldn’t find what it resembles to — accent, vocabularies, anything. The most logical bet has to be from its neighboring countries, like Sweden, Estonia and Russia. Right? 😬

Nope for the two of them. Both Swedish (the other official language in Finland) and Russian belong to the Indo-European group of languages, while Finnish and Estonian are Finno-Ugric languages. The Finno-Ugric languages share enough common lexical and grammatical features to prove a common origin. The common features they have include:

1. Absence of gender (the same Finnish pronoun, “hän,” denotes both “he” and “she”)
2. Absence of articles (a and the in English)
3. Long words due to the structure of the language (see agglutination)
4. Numerous grammatical cases
5. Personal possession expressed with suffixes
6. Postpositions in addition to prepositions
7. No equivalent of the verb “to have”

Let’s talk about agglutination for a bit, which means “a grammatical process in which words are composed of a sequence of morphemes (meaningful word elements)”. Turkish, Finnish, Japanese and Indonesia are some of the examples.

Example (日本語):

食べる / taberu: (“(subject) will eat (it)”)

食べたい / tabetai: (“(subject) wants to eat (it)”)

食べたくない / tabetakunai: (“(subject) doesn’t want to eat (it)”)

食べたくなかった / tabetakunakatta: (“(subject) didn’t want to eat (it)”)

In Bahasa Indonesia, “mempertanggungjawabkan” is formed by adding active-voice, causative and benefactive affixes to the compound verb “tanggung jawab”, which means “to account for”.

Finnish is typologically agglutinative and uses almost exclusively suffixal affixation. Nouns, adjectives, pronouns, numerals and verbs are inflected depending on their role in the sentence. TL;DR (but not really), below is a classic meme about it.

I know, right?

There are more lighter facts about Finnish language I thought would interest you.

Finnish was not written down until the middle ages.

Yes! Finnish was not written down at all until the Kingdom of Sweden annexed the country in the 15th century. Hundreds and hundreds of year were lost to history because no one wrote it down!

Okay to be fair, the Finnish went through a hard time during the Middle Ages as it was under Swedish rule. In those days, Swedish was used as an administrative language and Latin was the one preferred by the Church. The Swedens considered Finnish an inferior language, which prevented Finns from speaking it in public areas. However, kudos to the speakers of Finnish who kept their language alive during this time even though they were only using it in their personal conversations. The Swedens tried to remove Finnish completely from the household of the Finns but the latter was determined to keep speaking their language if only as an act of rebellion.

The first comprehensive writing system for the Finnish itself was created by Mikael Agricola, a Finnish bishop, in the 16th century.

Appelsiini is orange and omena is apple. This is grape.

Finnish similarity with Japanese language.

Many people say this which I kind of vouch for it. They both are agglutinative languages, both have vowel harmony, both are rich in vowels and they are similar in phonology. This is why so many people thought “Nokia” was a Japanese company.

Some people would say that they do have a distant “common relative”, which is fascinating given the distance between the two. However, this does explain why Finns seemingly have more ease of learning Japanese than other Western people.

Finnish loves literal words.

Here are some of the fascinating ones. I will put the words with the literal translations on the side. Can you guess what they actually are?

• Tietokone: Knowledge machine
• Huutokauppa: Shouting shop
• Lohikäärme: Salmon snake
• Linja-auto: Line car
• Laiskiainen: Lazy one (my favorite!)

(Answers: Computer, Auction, Dragon, Bus, and Sloth 🦥!).

Finnish has one of the world’s longest words.

As we have established, they use compound words or meaning words that are combined into one. By means, obviously, there is a single word for “airplane jet turbine engine auxiliary mechanic non-commissioned officer student” which is, inhale and hold your breath: “lentokonesuihkuturbiinimoottoriapumekaanikkoaliupseerioppilas”.

Oh, I don’t know what to do with that information either but you’re welcome.

Language is truly a fascinating thing. Being mostly exposed to Indo-European languages that are spoken by almost half of the world’s population, getting to know the Finnish language wouldn’t have ever crossed my mind. Which reminds me of The Knowledge Paradox.

The Knowledge Paradox: the more you think you know, the less you know. The more you know, the more you know you do not know.

So, which other countries I should YOLO and languages I should learn next year?

Hyvää Joulua from Turku! See you next year :)

This article is part of the 2021 HENNGE Advent Calendar. An Advent calendar is a special calendar used for counting down the days till Christmas. 2021 HENNGE Advent Calendar presents one article by one HENNGE member per day for 25 days until Christmas, 2021