Why Finnish is cooler than English

I admit, I don't spend a lot of time comparing English to Finnish. Someone far more qualified than me has, tho -- that's Tero Ykspetäjä, a science-fiction fanzine editor and recent guest blogger at Jeff Vandermeer's Ecstatic Days. In addition to posting about about science fiction in Finland, he came up with the Top Five Reasons Finnish Is Cooler Than English.

1. Finnish is more equal. We don’t have gender-specific personal pronouns, there’s just “hän” meaning both “he” and “she”. This is sometimes a problem for translators, but otherwise pretty neat. It also means we don’t have a language-related problem with people who don’t identify either as a he or a she, and maybe are therefore a little better equipped to treat them more normally in other respects too. If you want, feel free to borrow the word from us. We don’t mind.
2. We have more letters than you do. Your little alphabet ends with z, but we also have å, ä, and ö. And no, those aren’t umlauts. They are totally different letters that just look like a and o with umlauts. And more is naturally better.
3. Finnish is elegant and economic. You can say so much more with just one word. For example “epäjärjestelmällistyttämättömyydellänsäkään”. Ok, so that isn’t a word anybody would really ever use, but technically it’s still correct. It means something like, “even with his or her (notice how awkwardly I need to express that) ability to not make others more disorganized”. The downside to this is that if you want to participate in NaNoWriMo in Finnish, you have to produce quite a lot more content.
4. Finnish is clear and logical. Each letter corresponds with exactly one sound, always. No exceptions according to which letters it follows or where in the word it is. (With the single exception of “ng” which just makes the rule more precise.) No silent vowels either, so you always know how a word is pronounced by looking at it, even if you’ve never heard the word before. And the emphasis is always on the first syllable. If every language were this practical, learning them would be so much easier.
5. There’s no future tense in the Finnish language. The present tense is used instead. “No future,” as the Tähtivaeltaja slogan says. This makes it easy to seize the day, to live in the moment and not worry about tomorrow. At least in theory. There are some who insist on trying to introduce a sort-of future tense by artificial constructs like “you will come to know this,” but they are clearly in the wrong and should stop immediately.

I've heard "No future" before -- not just as the slogan for Tähtivaeltaja, which is a Finnish science-fiction magazine, but also in the Sex Pistols' song "God Save the Queen." But the idea of not having a future tense in your language? That blows my mind. What does it mean for conceptions of time in Finnish, when the future is expressed in the present tense? Wow, Finnish is cool. 

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo by Monika Bargmann via Flickr

Comments

[M. Scott]

One could use "one" in the place of "han".

You know, as in "even with one's ability to not make others more disorganized." Or you could even use 'their". Wow, two ways!

I mean, hey, Alexis Kivi is great and all... but the clear answer to any challenge about language superiority is always, simply Shakespeare.

My entire comment could have simply read: "Shakespeare." What more need be said in English to quell such opposition?

[John McCumber]

English has no future tense either. neither does German.They refer to the future by using auxiliary verbs--in German "werden" meaning "to become;" in English, "will," meaning (more or less) "desire." In both languages the auxiliaries used to refer to the future can also express probability, as in "she'll be home by now."

[Asim]

If more letters is the way to a better language, then Chinese - with its seemingly endless characters is the best language in the world.

[Nix]

All those reasons also apply to Tagalog. Well, except tenses, but I've never been able to figure out conjugation by prefix in Tagalog anyway.

[susan]

The above list excludes the most important and coolest point: Every single thing said above is also true of Hungarian, because Finnish belongs to the Finno-Ugric language group which includes only Finnish, Hungarian (the "Ugric" from Latin), and I believe Estonian is related.

These languages seem more difficult to learn, but once you do, there's a precision about them that only, allegedly, Japanese also shares. (In fact, DNA markers show a commonality with the Buryats of Siberia going way back, common to the Japanese.) Plus more recently, within the last thousand years or so, the Fins migrating up north from the Carpathian basin -- where Hungary lies -- after their common ancestors settled there. Guess it was too warm in Central Europe and the Fins wanted it a little colder, so they cozied up to Lappland.

This makes the Fins an anomaly in Scandinavia, and the Hungarians a linguistic and cultural/ ethnic anomaly in Central/ Eastern Europe, where they're surrounded by and caught between Slavs and Germanics.

Linguistically, Hungarian's picked up a bit here and there from German and European custom as well as Turkish, etc., for example, the formal vs. informal "you" which is still used in post-communist "egalitarian" Hungary. I don't think Finnish does this, being distanced from the Hapsburg history which made formal society de regeur for centuries.

Since geography is history when it comes to a small country, this is not an inconsequential fact. Any more than the fact that Finland is next to Mother of All Slavs Russia has been inconsequential to its history until recently.

[anonymous linguist]

Since this is about Finnish vs. English, I'll give English examples where I can.

1. One and they are both common gender neutral pronouns. The latter especially. Among younger speakers, I often hear it when there is no gender ambiguity.

"THEY put on THEIR skirt."

There isn't anything all that unusual about substituting the 3rd/plural pronouns, possessives, and reflexives for 3rd/singular. Spanish, for example, substitutes 3rd/single for 2nd/single in formal contexts (also in plural).

2. Naturally.

3. Something that might trip-up non-Finnish speakers is vowel harmony in those big words. Essentially, certain features of the vowel (in this case, whether or not the tongue is positioned more in the front or the back of the mouth) are held constant through the word. You can see this in the example word, "epäjärjestelmällistyttämättömyydellänsäkään": e, ä, i, ö are all made with the tongue in the front of the mouth. You can bet that before these words were smushed together and vowel harmony took over, there were quite a bit more u, o, and a vowels.

I don't think its particularly elegant or economic, but pretty cool, eh?

4. This is actually one of the things I find most fascinating about English. Essentially, when English was a Germanic language, where speakers placed stress was predictable: the first syllable. Then came the Norman conquest (1066) and the imposition of French upon Old English and Middle English speakers. Besides laying wreck to the stress system, English also developed a two level vocabulary of 'low' English words and 'high' French words: cow vs. beef, house vs. mansion. Innumerable smaller changes also resulted.

Oh, as a side effect of this and a few other things English spelling (more properly orthography) is a mess.

5. There is no future tense in English either. And, some Finnish speakers use the Swedish tulla as an axillary verb not unlike English future tense formation "going to", "will". Also, since Finnish has case marking, you could pull the future tense from the marking on the object of the verb (which you can not do in English).

For the article's author: Finns conception of the future is no different than your own, despite what Orwell, LeGuin, and other outstanding authors have included in their fiction.

(Whorf is dead)

[waqi]

puf, Amharic is better then