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From: dick@tjalk.UUCP (Dick Grune)
Newsgroups: net.nlang
Subject: Hor.Hacking Finnish/Estonian/Hungarian/Turkish
Message-ID: <522@tjalk.UUCP>
Date: Sun, 27-Oct-85 07:43:17 EST
Article-I.D.: tjalk.522
Posted: Sun Oct 27 07:43:17 1985
Date-Received: Wed, 30-Oct-85 04:42:28 EST
Organization: VU Informatica, Amsterdam
Lines: 164

Due to massive requests (plus/or the absence of massive protests):
here are Hacks 6-9 to distinguish between Finnish, Estonian,
Hungarian and Turkish; apologies will be found on the bottom line
of this article.

These are funny languages; they look weird, as if to be used by
recent immigrants from Mars only.  They look like APL to an
honest C programmer, but, ... once you are hooked, you turn out one
one-liner after the other!  So be warned!

Finnish and Estonian are very related, they watch each others' TV
programs, apparently with little difficulty.  Hungarian is related
but not more so than English is to Russian (F ka"si, Es ka"si, H ke'z:
E: hand, but F talo, H ha'z: house).

Turkish has quite the same stucture, but scientists are still
fighting over its relation with the above.  It has few words in
common with the above, but its structure is so similar that it helps
in learning it; see below.  There are words like T elma, H alma: E apple;
T anne, H anya: E mother, which may mean something.

These languages differ considerably from English and other familiar
languages, both in their structure and in their external appearance.

1.	They have double dots over the vowels, like German, Swedish or
Icelandic.   The reason is that they have some eight different vowels,
which are not easily accomodated by the latin A E I O U (Y).
So they put double dots over the A O and U.  Hungarian has even
short double dots and long double dots! (Short ones for a short o:
and u:, long ones for long o" and u").

2.	They don't have gender, i.e., no difference between he, she
or it, or his or her.  I suppose they have non-linguistic means of
distinguishing!

3.	They don't have consonant clusters (except an occasional ng
or nk).  There is no way to write "skruntch".

4.	They have awfully long words, by our standards.  There are
several reasons for this:
    a.	They consider compound words to be single words.  It
	is as if we would write shoebox, spicemerchant or
	leastcosterrorrecovery.
    b.	They put a lot of small words in a single word:
	E.g.: "in my house"
		H ha'zamban (ha'z-am-ban)	E house-mine-in
		T evimde (ev-im-de)		E house-mine-in
	but	F talossani (talo-ssa-ni)	E house-in-mine
	(watch the H -am-, T -im-, both meaning my; M seams to be Me
	all around; is this coincidence?).  This takes care of most
	of the small words that so delightfully brighten up a page
	of English!
    c.	They have no subordinate clauses, i.e. sentences that get
	glued to other sentences and cannot stand alone, in English
	marked by ... which ..., ... that ...  or ... because.
	Instead they use verb-nouns, of which they have plenty and
	which are best explained by example:
	They say, e.g.:
		alive-being-mine gladdens-me
			i.e.: I am glad that I am alive
	or even
		town-in John-uncle my-having-seen-him you-to I-told
			i.e.: I told you I've seen uncle John in town
	Especially Turkish can easily nest this 3 to 4 deep, with
	single sentences that may extend over 7 to 10 lines of code.
	A parser's [Turkish] delight!
	(Except Hungarian, which has normal subordinate clauses,
	like you and me)

5.	They don't have a verb for 'to have'.  Instead they use some
	form of "to be/to exist" with some form of possession:
	F minulla on raha --		on-me is money
	H pe'nzem van --		money-mine is
	T param var --			money-mine is
	E				I have money


And now for the hacks (assuming that through some magic agency you
know already you have to choose between F, Es, H and T):

Hack 6: If it contains double vowels, it's either Finnish or
	Estonian.  Hungarian only has double vowels by accident,
that is, where vowels happen to run together in the formation of
compound words:
	H Dunaujva'ros (Duna-uj-va'ros, E Danube-new-town
a place in Hungary).  It's the same with Turkish:
	T babaanne (baba-anne, E father-mother = grandmother)
(don't take the y for a vowel in Turkish, it's the same y as in
English "you"!)

Hack 7: If all the words end in vowels or in -n or -t, it's Finnish;
	on the other hand, if it contains b or g, it's Estonian;
likewise, if it contains u" it's Estonian, the u"-sound being
written y in Finnish (same sound as u" in German or u in French).
Estonian can be very roughly described as Finnish with most of the
end vowels cut off.
	Exx: F pa"iva", Es pa"ev: E day; F jalka, Es jalg: E foot.

Note:	Finnish is by far the most difficult language I've seen, no
insult intended.  This is *not* because of its 15 cases; in essence a
case ending is just a preposition that got moved and glued to the end
of the word (sometimes the gluing involves a lot of hanky-panky, to the
dismay of foreign students).  It is *not* because their verbs have
some 100 forms, since so has Hebrew.  It is *not* because it is
highly irregular, since so are the French verbs (all Indo-european
languages suffer from a bad case of verbitis irregularis), and we've
all mastered them, haven't we.  No, it is because it has ALL these
things together!  For each noun you have to learn 4 forms, duly
supplied by the better dictionary:
	man:
		mies --		a man
		miehen --	man's
		miesta" --	men
		miehia" --	men, partitive plural like in French:
			paljon miehia" -- beaucoup d'hommes -- many men
If you know these 4 you can construct the other 11.  If you think this
is unfair and "man" is probably irregular, here are two other entries:
F: viipale	viipaleen	viipaletta	viipaleita -- slice of bread
F: greippi	greippin	greippia"	greippeja" -- grapefruit
When they started on the verb I fled class, screaming.

Hack 8:
It's Hungarian when:
-	it has vowels with single accents on them
	Note: it just makes them longer
-	it has sz, cs or words ending in more than one consonant
	Note: cs is pronounced tsh, sz as s, c as ts, and single s as sh!
		this makes H csa'rda's  pr. tshaarrdaash
		and H gulya's  pr. gooyaash
It's Turkish when:
-	it has a c-cedille, that is a c-with-tail, or an s-cedille
	Note: c-cedille is dj, s-cedille is sh
-	a g with a half moon over it; it makes the preceeding
	vowel long, but is generally derived from an honest g or k.
-	most remarkable of all, an i without a dot, or a capital I
	WITH a dot on it: I.stanbul; this is another unfamiliar vowel.

Note:	Turkish may be complicated, but it is completely regular; no
irregular verbs, no irregular plurals etc.  Its main difficulty lies
in the complicated way they say things.

Note:	Given a verb V you can form another verb that means "to have
to V"; same with "to be able to V", and some others.  This is the
normal way to say such things:
H olvasni: E to read;		H olvashatni: E to be able to read,
H olvasom: E I read it;		H olvashatom: E I can read it.


Hack 9:	If it looks like Finnish but has no umlauts (those double
dots) at all, you're barking up the wrong tree altogether and looking
at a piece of Swahili, a language spoken by a considerable chunk
of Africa and remarkably similar to Finnish, but totally unrelated
it, even in the gullible mind of

					Dick Grune
					Vrije Universiteit
					de Boelelaan 1081
					1081 HV  Amsterdam
					the Netherlands

PS: Get some text or newspaper in these languages, if you are interested.
There's nothing like first-hand experience!

... but Lucretia ... she Borgia to death! -- Tom Lehrer.