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Re: Finnia is not Latin
Well possible! So it would be like with the "Germani", whose name was probably coined by the Celts (meaning "neighbour"). So the Fenni may have been the "marsh people" in some Germanic language, as a translation of the name the Finns gave to themselves (when?).There used to be a German word "Fenne" meaning "swamp", but it's not in use any more. The Grimm dictionary says that there was still "fehn" and "fenne" around in their time (mid 19th cent.), but it has now died out completely.I don't know much about the history of the Finnish people and what happened to them during the migration of nations. I have always wondered why their language is related to Hungarian and obviously to nothing else.Andy ;—)
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Finnish IS related to other languages than Hungarian. It is one of the Uralic languages which are divided into Samoyedic languages and Finno-Ugric languages. Other Finno-Ugric languages, obliviously, are closer to Finnish than Samoyedic languages. Some information about them:http://www.infoplease.com/ce6/society/A0818716.htmlhttp://www.fact-index.com/f/fi/finno_ugric_languages.htmlhttp://www.helsinki.fi/~tasalmin/fu.html
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Yes, of course Finnish is related to other languages, but not to those you might expect, if you don't know anything about languages. A couple of years ago I was really surprised to learn that Finnish is related to Hungarian. I understand both languages are pretty heard to learn. What about the Uralic languages? Can you speak any of those?Andy ;—)
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Finnish is my mother tongue and I have studied Estonian but it was a long time ago. It`s interesting how similar these two languages are. You can read something in Estonian and understand most of it but a word can mean complete different thing than in your own language. For example kannatus means support, approval in Finland but suffering in Estonia. Also Karelian is quite the same kind as Finnish so they can be easily found relatives.I don`t think Uralic languages are too hard to learn. They are just different than Indo-European languages (sentence structures etc.). And there has always been interaction between Indo-European and Finno-Ugric languages which has had its impact on the vocabulary.
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I must also add that Finnish is said to be the 'icebox' of (Indo-)European languages. Over the centuries, the interaction between the Finnish people and the rest of Europe has made quite an impact in the Finnish language. A number of originally Indo-European structures and words have survived 'deep-frozen' in Finnish, relatively unchanged. A text-book example is the Finnish word 'kuningas' (king). Etymologists have reconstructed the original Indo-European form to be *kuningaz. The word was obviously borrowed into Finnish at an early stage. In other languages, the present-day words deriving from that root have obviously gone through major changes: 'king' (English), 'König' (German), 'kung' (Swedish) etc.
Lass
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Thank you! Very interesting.
In my next life maybe …Andy ;–)
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