Monday, April 20, 2009

English Is Ridiculous, Very Manyth Edition

At the thought of learning a language like Finnish, or even Latin or German, many English speakers fret at the number of noun cases they would have to learn, fearing that this absurd facet will be impossible to wrap their heads around. But maybe this is a lot simpler than our convoluted way of doing things. In fact, the Finnish declension system, which basically does away with the need for prepositions, provides for much more streamlined phrasing, and cuts down greatly on the amount of vocabulary one needs to learn.

In English (Englantiksi), to express the concept of moving in the direction of a thing, there are numerous possibilities. Let's say I am talking about my home. I could say I am going: "to my home," "at my home," or "toward my home." Not too many things, right? But home is a special case. This provides two more options. I have an inflected/adverbial form, wherein I could go "homeward;" or I have a form where all inflection is assumed and the noun is used as an adverb, and I could just go "home."

In Finnish, among its several locative cases is the allative, which takes care of all of these options. Instead of going to my home, toward my home, or homeward, I go "kotille" (koti + lle)

So:





English
I'm going to my home
I'm going toward my home
I'm going at my home
I'm going homeward
I'm going home
Finnish
Minä menen minun kotille

The English language's lexical richness is a certainly virtue in many ways, but for my money it's hard to beat that Finnish efficiency. Of course, the alliteration helps too.

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