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From: pardoej@lonnds.ml.com (Julian Pardoe LADS LDN X1428)
Subject: Re: Measuring difficulty of languages
Message-ID: <Dw4vz4.K0C@tigadmin.ml.com>
Sender: usenet@tigadmin.ml.com (News Account)
Reply-To: pardoej@lonnds.ml.com
Organization: Merrill Lynch Europe
References: <3205e596.3672450@news.nando.net>
Date: Wed, 14 Aug 1996 15:21:04 GMT
Lines: 37

In article <3205e596.3672450@news.nando.net>, dgary@nando.net (D Gary Grady) writes:
-->"Karl M. Bunday" <bunda002@gold.tc.umn.edu> wrote:
-->
-->>I suspect a few of those relative rankings reflect different
-->>expectations for the actual USE of the language by British diplomats (?)
-->>who speak the differing languages. I find it difficult indeed to believe
-->>that Finnish is two levels higher in difficulty than, say, Indonesian or
-->>Swahili.
-->
-->You weren't alone in being surprised by the placement of Finnish.
-->While I don't speak Finnish, I have briefly studied it and I found it
-->an amazingly easy, regular, and logical language, with a
-->not-particularly-difficult phonology. Even vowel harmony, the only
-->complication in noun declension, seems entirely natural once you start
-->to get a feel for it. Perhaps there are difficulties that lie in wait
-->as one gets more deeply into the language, but few languages I've
-->encountered are so easy-looking at the outset of study.

It was the 16 rules for the formation of the plural stem and the 20
for the formation of the genitive plural that got me!!  Still, even
after few weeks I was beginning to develop a feel for it, so that
for instance I could recognize "lasten" as coming from "lapsi"
without having learned it.

Why does Finnish form the nominative plural from the singular stem
even though it has a separate plural stem?

A book about Estonian talked about i-plurals and d-plurals as though
they were two competing dialect variations.  The language seems
to have standardized on d-plurals: "In the countries" is "maades".
The Finnish nom. pl. looks like a d-plural and the other cases
like an i-plural.  Do some Finnish dialects have d-plurals, e.g.
does "maadessa" exist alongside "maissa"?

-- jP --


