Finnish is hardcore

Posted by – February 9, 2008

Fred Karlsson, head of the linguistics department at Helsinki, has on his web-page a generated list of word-forms for one Finnish word stem: kauppa (“shop”). It has 2253 forms. A random sampling:

kauppa-mme-kin-ko-han NOM SG PL1 KIN KO HAN
oh, our shops also [reference to earlier utterance]?
kauppo-j-e-si-kaan GEN PL SG2 KAAN
not even that/those of/from/belonging to your shops
kauppo-j-a-an-ko-s PTV PL SGPL3 KO S
oh, [absence-of-action-that-would-be-directed-towards] his/her shops [challenge/emphasis]?
kaupo-i-ksi-kin TRA PL KIN
[affirmative], to/into shops also

All perfectly parseable, at least to me. It rules to be a speaker of both a brutally synthetic language like Finnish and a strongly analytic language like English.

0 Comments on Finnish is hardcore

Respond

Respond

Comments

Comments