Re:Deconstructing Finnish
by saturdayplace on Monday August 18, 2014 @11:00AM
(#8192909)
I learned Hungarian as a Mormon missionary, and by far this agglutination (I'd never seen that term before) is my favorite part of the language. It's like being given a set of word legos and told "go nuts!" And it always seemed really regular to me; I was never as frustrated learning Hungarian as I was with German in high school.
We taught English classes there, which helped me realize just how capricious the language can seem to an ESL student.
Don't forget negative concord. "I haven't eaten nothing all day" makes a lot of sense in Uralic languages.
Re:Deconstructing Finnish
by BugBrother on Monday August 18, 2014 @01:08PM
(#8193496)
So "Hungarian notation" is a language joke too?! Damn, so many years and I never made the connection.
Among the unusual things in Hungarian are agglutination (Turkish has it too and even Esperanto) and vowel harmony (mostly found in Turkic and Uralic languages).
Agglutination example: House is ház, apple is alma. Inside the house is ház[ban], inside the apple, almá[ban]. Inside [my] house is ház[am][ban], inside [my] apple almá[m][ban]. And so forth. It's kind of like postfix notation.