I before E except after Ö
This
afternoon I received the proofreader's corrections for my next book in
mail. It was in some kind of special package that required me to go
down to sign for it. For some reason, the mailman thought that my Homer
Simpson slippers were amusing. I just spent two hours going through the
pile of paper and correcting the errors of the manuscript in OpenOffice.
As usual, I had made some systematic errors throughout the book, but in addition, there were small typos and errors that resulted from editing only a part of a sentence without reading the full sentence afterwards. However, the proofreader had specifically noted that the text contained an exceptionally small number of typos and grammar errors, especially those that concern commas. Rules concerning commas have a reputation of being difficult in Finnish, to the extent that in the common parlance, the expression "comma rules" sometimes stands for the grammar as a whole.
I had made a couple errors with commas, but correcting them reminded me of the high school Finnish classes. All those things had been taught to me, but I had simply forgotten them after all these years. Now, if I could just recall the proper difference between "that" and "which" in English...
One interesting systematic mistake emerged from the fact that since Finnish doesn't have prepositions at all, but a suffix is added to the word for the same purpose. In addition, this suffix must agree with the vowels inside the word itself, so there are several versions of the same suffix for different words. A proper Finnish word can contain either only the back vowels a, o and u or only the front vowels ä, ö and y, but not both. For example, "auto" is a proper word, but "äuto" couldn't possibly be Finnish. The vowels i and e are neutral and can coexist with vowels of either group.
In a compound word, this rule applies separately to each individual subword, but not to the compound word as a whole. Now, does the word "parametri" (parameter) become "parametreissa" or "parametreissä" in inessive case, knowing that the word "metri" (meter) becomes "metreissä"? Nope, it's the first one with -ssa is correct, since "parametri" is not a compound word in Finnish. Well, that one was easy enough to fix with just search and replace.
As usual, I had made some systematic errors throughout the book, but in addition, there were small typos and errors that resulted from editing only a part of a sentence without reading the full sentence afterwards. However, the proofreader had specifically noted that the text contained an exceptionally small number of typos and grammar errors, especially those that concern commas. Rules concerning commas have a reputation of being difficult in Finnish, to the extent that in the common parlance, the expression "comma rules" sometimes stands for the grammar as a whole.
I had made a couple errors with commas, but correcting them reminded me of the high school Finnish classes. All those things had been taught to me, but I had simply forgotten them after all these years. Now, if I could just recall the proper difference between "that" and "which" in English...
One interesting systematic mistake emerged from the fact that since Finnish doesn't have prepositions at all, but a suffix is added to the word for the same purpose. In addition, this suffix must agree with the vowels inside the word itself, so there are several versions of the same suffix for different words. A proper Finnish word can contain either only the back vowels a, o and u or only the front vowels ä, ö and y, but not both. For example, "auto" is a proper word, but "äuto" couldn't possibly be Finnish. The vowels i and e are neutral and can coexist with vowels of either group.
In a compound word, this rule applies separately to each individual subword, but not to the compound word as a whole. Now, does the word "parametri" (parameter) become "parametreissa" or "parametreissä" in inessive case, knowing that the word "metri" (meter) becomes "metreissä"? Nope, it's the first one with -ssa is correct, since "parametri" is not a compound word in Finnish. Well, that one was easy enough to fix with just search and replace.
It's strange Finnish doesn't use ü, ä, and ö for front versions of vowels u, a and ö as in German.
That would have left us letters 'y' and 'j' to be used as in English, instead of having combination 'dž' for the seldom used sound English speakers write as 'j'. (As in name Fidži = Fiji).
Posted by Anonymous | 6:42 AM
Finnish does have prepositions, just a lot fewer than Indo-European languages. Ennen and ilman come to mind. There are of course also postpositions (asti, kautta) and words that can be both pre- and postpositions (keskellä, lähellä).
The difference between that and which is that that introduces a restrictive clause and which does not; "the bread that I bought yesterday" serves to differentiate that bread from the bread I might have bought today or the day before yesterday, "the bread, which I bought yesterday" just serves to mention when the bread was bought.
Posted by Vera | 4:42 PM
Yeah, what Vera said is right. Or, as my students told me when I asked them, "the difference is that 'which' has a comma before it." See? Comma rules.
Posted by Anonymous | 11:06 PM
How about the following difference:
"Yesterday I found a diamond that was nice",
"Yesterday I found a diamond, which was nice".
Maybe this difference has something to
do with the comma rules?
Posted by Anonymous | 2:30 PM
Yeah, so which would usually be used in an apositive phrase, or something:
The bread, which I bought yesterday, was moldy!
Posted by beenaround | 9:37 PM