RE: Birdie Birds And Great Tits
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continue with the "I have no clue" vibes
Despite of what I sometimes decide, this writing style is where I always go back to because it's the most fun for me as I don't have to be all grown up about writing. What ever pops in to my head, I usually let it roll through my fingers to the blog. :D
wat die oog nie sien nie maak die hart nie seer nie
So many nie -words! I'm gonna learn this, pronouncing it like a German person would and little Finish pronunciation there too and don't know if I should swallow few words too, just to convince myself that I know what I'm doing although I don't. This is fun!
Mitä silmä ei näe - sitä sydän ei sure.
That's the Finnish way of saying the same thing. :)
To be honest, that is the best writing! I did this in some areas of my Master's thesis and somehow it just worked. The people who marked my thesis and reviewed it stated their joy reading it. So, my friend, let it just roll (and flow) through your fingers into your blogs.
Beautiful! (I listened through google translate and that sounded really poetic to my untrained ear.)
One of the quirks in Afrikaans that non-native speakers cannot do! This is one of the markers in Afrikaans where you can spot a non-native speaker almost immedietely.
In most languages, especially germanic ones, like English and Dutch you negate with one word:
"I did not eat the apple"
"Ik heb de appel niet gegeten"
In Afrikaans we have a double negation:
"Ek het nie die appel geëet nie".
In my own poetry and other poetry, we sometimes leave the last "nie" out. Most Afrikaans language "purists" (yes we have language purist groups) cannot stand the drop of the second "nie". Funny.
Oh gosh, I didn't remember google translate had that. I have no idea where my brain was and that I had a blind spot with this. :)
I've always said to everyone who use the double negation in Finnish language that double negative turns things in to positive, just like some cases in math. :D It's not the case but using double negative just makes the sentence just really weird. Then again I do also use that because I like to twist words and sentences and I hope people understand that I know it's not correct, I just want to say it like that sometimes.
One of the things that is slowly happening to Finnish is that the suffixes in some words are just left out. Depending on who you are talking about (I, you, we...) there needs to be a suffix (and you don't need to use the personal pronoun if you don't want to) but in some cases the younger people have started to use the basic form.
ottaa = take
(minä) otan = I take
(sinä) otat = you take
(hän) ottaa =she/he takes
(me) otamme= we take --> but some speak: me ottaa
(te) otatte = you take --> te ottaa
(he) ottavat = they take --> he ottaa
So I think people have the need to talk simpler, which in some cases may lead to leave the suffixes away but then again then you need to add the personal pronoun so the grammar starts to look like English language. Perhaps that's also is the case with the nie word. People want to speak shorter and simpler and then additional words that perhaps aren't needed to get the message understood, are left out. Anyway, I'm just guessing.
I will remember this one! What a fun way to see life!
Oh yes, absolutely. It is a funny and sad thing at the same time. I think it is across languages and we tend to "blame" English, even though I think English is also undergoing this "simplification". Maybe we should blame (i) instant messages/gratification/etc., and (ii) people having less time to focus creating shorter attention spans. I think it is way more complex than that, but we are living in a period, I think, where quasi-simplification rules. "Get to the point and get to it quickly I have a meeting in 5 minutes!". Let us hope that the poets and writers will keep languages rich and diverse! Otherwise, we will all speak the same soon. (I think languages are dying out quicker than most animals. And no one is speaking about it beyond the linguists.)
I dread for the day when we start solely writing with abbreviations and emojis. 😬 I do use both, sometimes, but usually try to avoid them because of several reasons, for instance if I make a joke, I usually don't want to add a smiley or an emoji because I think that if the person reading it doesn't understand that I was joking, I'm either terrible in it, sarcasm or irony, or the persons brainwaves aren't tuned the same way as mine and in both cases, my opinion is that adding a smiley is futile because it makes the dry humor not so dry anymore but obvious and that's not what I meant and if someone doesn't get it, it doesn't matter. And of course I also avoid using too much emojis because I dread for the possible other meaning they might have. And if you don't know the person sending you emojis and some might have several meanings, wouldn't it be horrible if I just answered to you: 😕🦅🥘🏵GHKL🤡🏩😌🤑SFI☢️🤹♂😎GJI
I have no idea what I just said. I can only hope I didn't say anything bad.
But. Are we going to that direction? Because that would be horrible.
Let's hope so. But, as we spoke before, languages are also evolving, not just vanishing. For instance it's really weird to hear sometimes some teenagers and young adults speak English words and hear them conjugate the words like Finnish words. And speak the words like a Finnish speaker. In gaming it's really common.
Run here = Juokse tänne --> Runnaa tänne.
So perhaps at some point Finnish will be just one of the many English dialects in the world.
That is legit a good reason!
Like language, the meanings change over time, but unlike language, they change rapidly. Tomorrow they can have another meaning to a group. I am always reminded of a story in my country (maybe everywhere as well) this granny used LOL on a sad message with the 🤣. She thought it meant lots of love and the tears meant crying. Needless to say, like memes, they change meaning so quickly.
Let us hope that we are not moving in that direction.
I think more "in-groups" and "out-groups" are going to form. Some people will gravitate towards that minimalist language and others will move back to the archaic versions. I can see it happen in Afrikaans amongst younger people. Some people are overly attached to the archaic version and some are embracing the minimalist one.
Maybe. We already mentioned it, various languages are suffering a similar fate. We might go so far that we will re-invent proto-indo-european language!
Or much further down the language tree to include finno-Ugric languages as well. But worry not, although I'm not an expert, I took a look and did my own research and found out that as Finnish is one of the ten oldest languages, it actually is the one and only language that still uses the same words as was used in the worlds oldest, the first, the one and only mother tongue, the before-pre-pre-pre-proto-all-languages-language. So fear not, I can tell you those few keywords which all people should start using from now on. There's: "mhh", "rrrh", "aaa", "umh" and "hmm" just to mention few. Depending on where you use these old words and phrases, they mean: "I'm satisfied", "go away", "come", "mine not yours", "sleep now", "it's dark", "hungry", "we eat", "I said go away", "my cave", "sad", "happy", "we go fish", "sauna time", "watch fire".
So much more obvious than emojis.
Finns refused to change all their words to modern, fancy words so these are the ones you can still use and all Finns will understand. Heck, we might perhaps accept you to our tribe!
Mmrumh.
P.S.
I'm sorry, being all serious about stuff has it's toll on me. My jokes build up and at one point I just have to let them out or, I don't know, our universe explodes or something. I've been saving this idea for a while now and now that I've let it out, I feel much better. :D
Loved this comment! All the tension and build-up and the release at the end. I can feel your "feeling better".
I tend to take topics too far! Blame the academic in me. It was drilled into me that "a thesis can only be defended in 120 pages and more!" So my limit is not reached easily. It really makes it hard to hold a normal conversation as I tend to go over things for too long.
Before I continue with my lengthy essay, let me just say that Finnish is awesome in the sense! Afrikaans is only like 120 years old.
I'd say that's a really good personality trait generally but especially good, academically thinking. Studying and careerwise.
Well, if a normal conversation is just talking about light topics, not going too deep, changing the topic often, then, I guess so, but I've never been a fan of "normal" conversation because small talk isn't easy for me but then again going really deep with those topics that I'm passionate or just curious about, is really easy. So in my point of view, I'd call that, really properly talking about things, a normal conversation.
Then again I am also a fan of talking about nothing or off topic chit-chat (which I don't consider to be small talk), getting stuck on words, not picking on someone but just thinking how funny things are. So no normal conversation there either. At least, what I assume, from a normal persons point of view. But who want's normal? Not that it's a bad thing at all but the definition should be discarded completely or it should be wider.
And before I take this conversation deeper in to the uncharted territory, let me just say that Afrikaans is wonderful because you already understand a little bit few other languages only knowing your own mother tongue. Finnish speakers don't. No-one understands us and we understand no-one. :D Not even Estonians. Or perhaps few words but you can never be quite sure if that word you recognize has the same meaning. It's like: "Haha, you said a funny thing... or did you just insult me?"
Good then! It all matters from what perspective you are looking at things. If you are going for a beer at the pub no one really wants to hear about power politics in Foucault.
And true right, but one thing, if I can get a little political myself, in South Africa and Afrikaans, we tend to look north towards Europe and the Netherlands. But we forget the wonderful languages in South Africa. I am so sad that my parents never exposed us to say Xhosa or Zulu. I am trying to learn these languages now, but I am really bad at learning new things, especially languages. (And the sad thing is we were not exposed to these languages due to in part apartheid and all that nonsense.) Let me not get too political on this topic!
That must be very lonesome for no one to understand you, but also very humbling to speak such an old language?
Or you just haven't found the right pub for that.
I have only a vague comprehension about apartheid so get political if you want, I'd like to know more. And when it's about language, it's not even off topic, which is also okay. :)
I haven't really thought about it that way and I'm not sure if the majority of Finns know how old Finnish language is compared to other languages. And the Finnish mentality, at least the stereotype of it, is that we're fine on our own and let us just be in our dark caves isn't the kind that would suffer loneliness that much. Besides, I tend to mention the weirdness of Finnish language pretty often in my comments or posts so I guess I'm proud of it. Yeah, that's it, I'm proud. Good thing that you made me think about what I think about my mother tongue.
True! So I did some courses on linguistics and second language acquisition. I am no expert, it is more from a psychology perspective as well where my interest is. But from the courses I did, the current data points to parents from previously disadvantaged wants their children to go to school in English. The reason for this, in apartheid South Africa, home language schooling for those doing Xhosa, Zulu, etc., was inferior quality. Today, I think that across languages, the education is better. But loads of parents from that era, plus the children who went through what was then called "Bantu education" want to send their children to English schools. A lot of these children are not proficient in English, as they do not hear it at home that much, so they fall behind. The one stat was something like, children who get home language schooling (Afrikaans, English, Xhosa, Zulu, etc.) are two grades ahead of children who get education in their second language as their main schooling language.
Plus, very few Afrikaans and English speakers go through the trouble to acquire a language like Xhosa or Zulu. And the one reason, I would guess, is that my generation (1990's baby) did not get exposure to those languages when we were young. You might have heard about it, but the critical acquisition period or critical period hypothesis for gaining home or first language proficiency. I think that you need to be exposed to a language before puberty. Long story short, in South Africa language is very political, but things are changing, I think, or hope.
Oh, I am glad I could do this! And yes, one rarely thinks about these things if one is not reminded of them. I think that few people really care about the history of things if it doesn't help them gain something. If you cannot "use" the fact that Finnish is one of the oldest languages to your advantage (think, like in politics and national identity) then people will easily forget about it. For example, people in South Africa easily boast about our 11 official languages, but if you look at the practical implementation, mostly we use English and sometimes, depending on region, we use English, Afrikaans, and Xhosa (Western and Eastern Cape) or Zulu (KwaZulu Natal).
I think the same thing has been a problem in Finland too with the Saami language (in northern Finland) that has been spoken as long as Finnish as both languages descend from the same proto-language but unfortunately there were more Finnish speakers than Saami speakers so I think there never was a proper education in Saami as there were just Finnish or Swedish speaking schools. So if one didn't speak Finnish well, learning must have been really difficult.
I hope so too. Too many people don't see how different languages and different people are the richness of life, not something that just needs to changed so that everyone are or speak the same.
Uh, I so recognize this here too. People who seem to be so proud of certain things do not necessarily support that in real life. But lets hope things get better, if not in any other way than old conservative decision makers dying to old age and younger and wiser people take their places. So I'm virtually rising my glass here now and stating: "Here's to dying!"
This is actually so sad. Afrikaans is a relatively young language (how we speak it today, something like 100 years old). And it is slowly dying according to one idea about the survival of languages: education. As you mentioned, without education in a language, it will be difficult for that language to survive. Afrikaans is in some sense banished from tertiary education (except for small portions in universities). This is affecting secondary education as more and more Afrikaans speaking secondary students are opting for English due to University (i.e., tertiary education) being almost exclusively English. (We find it more and more that if we meet up "academically" pure Afrikaans speakers will talk to each other in English even though both speakers are second language English speakers.) There are obviously other factors as well, but education and language goes hand in hand I would argue.
Oh yes! I cannot agree more. Even though we humans are very similar in most regards, culture and language give life so much more color. It is wonderful to experiences different cultures in terms of how they conceptualize the world but also in terms of food, etc. Losing even only one language is an irrevocable and utterly sad tragedy.
What a wonderful metaphor! Indeed, but let us hope the dying is of such character that it provides nutrients and not anti-nutrients so that we can flourish in our rich diversity and multiplicity.