As a test to see how easy it would be to implement Oahpa for a new language, I decided to do so with already existing morphological and syntactic analysis tools and data for Finnish. I hope to spend a little time improving it in the next few weeks, 'cause it'll certainly benefit some Finnish learners out there. :)

Try it here: http://finoahpa.donchaknow.com/oahpa/

Oahpa is a collection of language learning games, which range from inflecting words to vocabulary building, to using word inflections in the context of sentences. For languages this is particularly important, because words are inflected in specific ways for certain types of sentences which take learners a while to grasp. For instance, the case of the object of verbs may vary depending on what the verb is. pitää plus partitive means 'hold', while pitää plus elative means 'like'. Similarly, if you say "I feel happy", the form that 'happy' takes differs from if you use it in a sentence like "I am happy."

The original Oahpa games are available in Northern Sámi and (coming soon) Southern Sámi, and they, like the Finnish test version, are based on morphological analysis tools which can generate all word forms given a specific word; as well as syntactic analysis tools which (generally) will mark words as subjects or objects, but also provide much more detailed information such as what verbs agree with. These analysis tools are then used to analyze sentences that learners type to give feedback on common issues, such as verb agreement, case usage and so on.

Although the Finnish Oahpa has only two exercises, I'll post some updates if I carry over more games from Northern Sámi Oahpa. In the meantime, happy inflecting!

Some of this is sort of adopted from a comment left elsewhere on the internets for someone asking about imperatives in languages. While musing over the data in Finnish and Northern Sámi, there appears to be an interesting puzzle: 2nd person imperatives are different from the imperatives formed for all other persons, in that non-2nd person imperatives appear to all be decended from an optative mood while 2nd-person imperatives are morphologically distinct. Perhaps this is analagous to the English imperative strategy, in which the 2nd person imperative is a bare verb stem: Go!, Sleep!; while other persons are formed periphrastically: May he go, Let him sleep.

Finnish and Northern Sámi

In Finnish, and closely related languages the second person imperative is formed with a bare verb stem, while other persons and numbers have additional morphemes, most of which include -k- (said by some to be a historical present tense marker).

(1)     mennä 'go'; mene-n 'I come

                sg.         pl.
        1.      --          menkäämme
        2.      mene        menkää
        3.      menköön     menkööt

The negative imperative is formed with help of an auxilliary negative verb, älä (2), which has similar morphology.

(2)             sg.         pl.
        1.      --          älkäämme
        2.      älä         älkää
        3.      älköön      älkööt

According to Maija Länsimäki, these ko/kö morphemes are originally from the optative. While this doesn't directly say anything about the plural 1st and 2nd persons, it seems like there's a chance that they are either related by way of optative, or connected to the present marker theory (2nd person imperative of tulla was originally *tulek).

What is just as interesting about this pattern is when the negative verb occurs with other verbs, e.g., don't go:

(3)             sg.             pl.
        1.      --              älkäämme menkö
        2.      älä mene        älkää menkö
        3.      älköön menkö    älkööt menkö

The same -ko/-kö appears on the verb. Is this a form of optative agreement, or something else? If these forms are connected, is the -ko/-kö marker found in questions (Nauroiko Mikko? 'Did Mikko laugh?') also related, or is this just a coincidence brought on by the small phoneme inventory in Finnish?

A similar pattern is to be found in Northern Sámi, as well, but slightly extended because NS allows for singular, dual and plural number (4). This paradigm is exactly the same for the negative auxilliary (5), however NS does not have anything similar to the -ko/-kö which occurs on the main verb in negative imperatives (these all occur in one form for all persons and numbers).

(4)     mannat 'to go'
                sg.         du.          pl.
        1.      mann-on     mann-u       mann-ot
        2.      mana        mann-i       mann-et
        3.      mann-os     mann-os-ka   mann-os-et

 

(5)     ale 'Neg'
                sg.         du.         pl.
        1.      allon       allu        allot
        2.      ale         alli        allet
        3.      allos       alloska     alloset

Here we see that 2nd person singular offers a bare stem, and that all other non-2nd person imperatives have a round vowel (o/u often alternate in NS, and in precisely this situation) which is specific to these situations only. The availability of dual in the paradigm allows us to see that there is something about 2nd person here that separates it from the other persons: and perhaps this is a difference of mood.

Estonian, as best as I can find, also has a similar pattern in the negative imperative auxilliary; but I can't find out how the main verbs go for non-2nd person imperatives. Anyone...?

(6)     minema 'go'
                sg.        pl.
        1       --         --
        2       mine       minge
        3       --         --

 

(7)     ära 'Neg'
                sg.        pl.
        1       --         ärgem
        2       ära        ärge
        3       ärgu       ärgu

Generalities?

This at least establishes that this pattern is similar in Finnish, Northern Sámi and Estonian (and apparently English), but what does it mean? One could assume from all of this that 'true' imperatives are restricted only to 2nd person, and other persons may be expressed with other moods for semantic reasons... 2nd person imperatives are only applied directly to the listener from the speaker and are commands, while 1st and 3rd person imperatives may refer to someone perhaps outside of the conversation and as such speakers may only wish for things that these persons may do.

Since I haven't Googled around yet, these are only my musings. May someone reading this come forward with more knowledge!

Interesting occurrance at the University of Helsinki— er, Helsingin yliopisto (I don't want to add to the problem). Translated the original article from Finnish, just drop a comment if there is anything that doesn't flow.

Language planning is always difficult, and I see that they want to bring in a more international crowd... But, there are a few issues: it is just a little ridiculous to reduce the ability of many other students to succeed in their field because there is one person who doesn't speak the language (and I'm assuming they mean one student out of a group of 20, or so). Also, if the program is a majority of Finnish-language speakers, why are they admitting people who cannot speak it? Or, is this just one of those combined programs for Finnish and international students?

Maybe I'm also just grumpy because I like Finnish.

The predominance of English has lead to complaints about the University of Helsinki

Original text: Anniina Wallius

A complaint was sent to the chancellor of justice as a result of the University of Helsinki's language politics. The complaint comes as a result of the university's Faculty of Agriculture and Forestry Science, which has decided that Finnish students must attend all of their courses in English if their is at least one foreign student in their class.

The complaint was made by one of the department's students, who views the language policy as violating a policy in the Finnish constitution. According to the law, Finnish citizens have the right to study in their native language. Finnish language professor Auli Hakulinen supports the complaint.

"Finland only has room for one thought at a time, and now the thought is that of globalization and competition. This is interpreted such, that English should be used in courses at all levels. Let all of the Finnish top researchers write in English, but that's quite a separate issue from basic studies to those, who leave after graduating to go take care of pigs," Hakulinen criticizes.

In her view, the problem results particularly from master's programs, which have now been started in large numbers in both Finnish and English. Taking cost savings into account, these programs are easy to combine, but resultantly if a class of students contains one foreigner, it is determined that the language for everyone should be English.

Another manifestation of the pursuit of internationalization is the universities' English names. The English names have been put before all other names in universities in regions outside of Helsinki.

"The regional universities are meant to serve local needs, but just now they want to be first to show that they are fun and international. For instance, there's the University of Eastern Finland and the Lappeenranta University of Technology. A mere name, however, does not increase the level of the teaching and research," says Hakulinen.

An assault committed against the Finnish language

Hakulinen sees a small spark of hope in the University of Helsinki's strategies, which must be renewed in the coming months because of a new university law. Hakulinen would allow that the new strategies are not just a question of pushing paper, and rather that there is also practical guidance on how to protect the national languages.

To those making university decisions, Hakulinen recommends taking literary translation as a model. According to her, the most purposefully international people in Finland are the translators.

"They are at an outpost, and they take the trouble to think about how the main and best works appearing elsewhere can be translated into Finnish. Culturally they are on a completely different level than the University people, who are committing an assault against their native language," says Hakulinen.

Hakulinen stresses that there is no need to go back to a one mind, one language approach, "A while ago it was a momentary political need, but in reality Finland has never had only one language, nor should it ever have one."

The radio cultural news program also called Marketta Sipi, the dean of the Faculty of Agriculture and Forestry, to hear about the field's language of practice, but Sipi did not have a comment on the issue. The university rector has responded to the complaint made to the chancellor of justice, but the chancellor has not yet given a decision.

I discovered an awesome album on Spotify of various classic covers in Finnish: Niin kauan kuin tää kestää saa, featuring Anki Lundqvist. It features a cover of Wild Mountain Thyme, for which I couldn't find the lyrics online, so I thought I'd post them here.

aamun myötä tuuli herää
laajat maat käy uuteen päivään
yöstä taas voimaa saan
silmät suljen vaikka herään
saman maan nähdä saan

jostain maat vielä nousee
nousee tiet joita kuljen
silmät suljen vaikka herään
uuden maan nähdä saan

jostain maat vielä nousee
nousee tiet joita kuljen
silmät suljen vaikka herään
uuden maan nähdä saan

In almost every discussion of language variation in the world, Finnish comes up due to its wealth of case endings. There are languages that have even more, such as Hungarian, and most languages have less. Of the languages I've learned that mark cases with suffixes, I could say that on average they have somewhere around 6 cases (excluding of course, languages very closely related to Finnish which have a similar number). I've learned some with slightly more, and some with slightly less. This amount of cases is what usually gets Finnish labeled as "difficult", but, this difficulty doesn't make Finnish impossible to learn.

Here I've attempted to collect some of my own internal reasonings based on the various things I've read over the course of time I've learned Finnish. As such, a lot of the material I don't remember my source for... Except for this source, a brief grammatical reference, which I used to check the latinate case names which I often forget. I'll list some additional resources below, as I remember or come across them, for those interested. One of the great resources is Hakulinen's Suomen kielen rakenne ja kehitys 'Structure and Development of the Finnish Language', but sadly I don't have access to it right now to check some of my memories and theories.

Read more

Aamulehti reports (with pictures, for proof!) that a well-known clothing chain in Finland, Seppälä, is holding a design competition in which a Pedobear shirt was competing for some amount of time. There's not much original journalism available in the Aamulehti article (which lists its source as Iltalehti), so there isn't much to report; however, Seppälä removed the image as word that Pedobear was available spread. According to Aamulehti, the bear was so harmless looking that Seppälä obviously had no reason do doubt whether it was fit to print or not.

If you don't know what (or who) Pedobear is, take a look at Encyclopedia Dramatica's article (totally not safe for work, if you don't know what Encyclopedia Dramatica is), which explains everything. Normally, ED wouldn't be a reputable source, but it appears the English-language Wikipedia has deleted their Pedobear article a few times, so if you crave Wikipedia Pedobear wisdom, it is available in Finnish.

Now, who exactly is running this design competition? If they missed this, who knows what other 'borrowed' designs they're missing...

Moving in... So, prepare for little bugs. If anything explodes and gives an error, drop a comment with the URL that was problematic. If other inconsistencies occur, also mention. I'm working on ironing those out but I only have one set of eyes! Blog posts may be a bit sparse to start with, but check out the Selection of Truly Exciting Finnish Words... I'm populating that with more words than there will be blog entries for while.

The content of this blog is not necessarily meant to be Northern Sámi-centric, but it just happens to be what I'm working on more lately, as will be explained in future posts. The reason for this is not that I am culturally Northern Sámi myself, but rather, I am a student of linguistics who has taken an interest in this language and its respective culture and language family. I'm basically a big nerd for Finno-ugric languages, and not ashamed to admit it.

Things may slowly end up getting tweaked through use. For instance, the Selection of Truly Exciting Finnish Words is currently in it's infancy, but I expect it to grow. Some words are not as thoroughly populated with interesting tidbits, or are there as a placeholder for more information. Word tags also contain a decent amount of information, for example: consonant gradation and the ghost consonant tags. Drop comments where comments are welcome; they'll only help improve things.

The sanasto itself does not store all word forms individually, and instead they are generated by a series of rules. I will be tweaking the underlying code that handles this over the course of time, so for any of you Finnish speakers out there, please tell me if you notice odd inflections, or are aware of additional variation that is available in certain words (e.g., tunturia/tuntureita). Be advised that Standard Finnish may accept one thing, but this may not be true of the wealth of Finnish dialects.

Happy reading and word-sleuthing!