Where might Finnish lead?
English 'began life as a hard-nosed Germanic dialect, was overrun by French-speaking Normans, had a thing for Latin and Greek borrowings, collected whatever linguistic crumbs fell out of its seafaring merchant-class’s coats, picked up house, moved across a few oceans, eavesdropped on the natives, settled down and invited its poor European and Eastern cousins to live with it and then learned how to use a computer.’ (Thanks Merriam-Webster) I have a love for my native mongrel language: it may not have the grace of a show dog, but our stout little English will romp and frolic all its life long, strengthened by its jumbled gene pool. But it is time for me to give my attention to a purer bred language. Nick and I are about to start our month's intensive learning Finnish.
Finnish is exotically distant from English. On the Indo-European language tree, English is close to French and German, a few branches off are Russian and Polish, further away are Hindi and Persian and right on the other side of the tree is Bengali, Punjabi, Nepali and Kurdish. If you’re wondering why I haven’t mentioned where Finnish is on the tree, that’s because it’s on another language tree entirely along with Hungarian and Estonian. This is how far distant the Finnish language is from English.
The prospect of learning Finnish feels like I am about to dive into a history filled with the ghosts of reindeer herders and covered with snow. I have an odd ally in my perhaps overly romantic view of the Finnish language. J.R.R. Tolkein said about Finnish: “it was like discovering a wine-cellar filled with bottles of amazing wine of a kind and flavour never tasted before. It quite intoxicated me.” I need to think of it in such romantic terms, because it is rated as a category 4 (of 5) in terms of difficulty to learn for English speakers. Also, outside of Finland, how useful do you imagine Finnish will be to me? Without motivations romantic, I’ll give up as soon as they trot out the 15 cases which can be divided into five groups, each of which consists of three cases.
In some ways Finnish will be difficult to learn, but in other ways, it is quite straightforward. From my basic Finnish studies so far, Finnish seems so remarkably regular! By which I mean, when I learn a rule of grammar or pronunciation, I am not then thrust into those mires of exceptions to the rules that we love to hate in English. Take as a simple example the pronunciation of the letter 'y' in Finnish. Y is a vowel that sounds closest to our letter 'u'. Here are some words in English that make the Finnish 'y' vowel sound: grew, you, do, too, lieu, through, true. So seven different letter combinations in English can be used to make one sound. In Finnish, there is simply one letter to make that one sound, and no other way of forming that sound.
I often wonder to what extent our language shapes our identity. Would I be a different person if I had grown up on Finnish? Would I have more appreciation of the regular, practical and simple? These are concepts I often hear Finnish people use to define their cultural identity. Is that because of language? I have no idea, but I enjoy thinking about what I would or could be if my language were different. Had I grown up speaking Vietnamese, I may never have been able to pose this question (a concept that Phuc Tran explores brilliantly in this TEDx talk, and you should go watch it right now. Go)
