Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Posting-Version: version B 2.10.1 6/24/83 (MC840302); site tjalk.UUCP Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!bonnie!akgua!whuxlm!harpo!decvax!ucbvax!ucdavis!lll-crg!seismo!mcvax!vu44!botter!tjalk!dick 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.