• ContrarianTrail@lemm.ee
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    23 days ago

    In Finnish, I can simply ask, “Juoksenneltaisiinko?” whereas in English, I have to say, “Should we run around aimlessly?”

    • Nomecks@lemmy.ca
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      23 days ago

      Traipse?

      That’s the full sentence asking if you want to run around aimlessly.

      • ContrarianTrail@lemm.ee
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        23 days ago

        Interesting word, I hadn’t heard of that one before. While not exactly perfect translation, it seems like a similar kind of word nevertheless. Doesn’t exactly seem to refer to running directly though.

        I guess that in the case of my example, it’s more of a demonstration of how weirdly Finnish language can work. Juosta = run, juoksennella = run around aimlessly, juoksenneltaisiinko? = should we run around aimlessly?

        • Dasus@lemmy.world
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          22 days ago

          Yeah but no-one would ever really use a word like that. It’s just the example given in all memes, but a a more realistic one than epäjärjestelmällistyttämättömyydellänsäkäänköhään. I think it would be more probable that in that scenario, a Finn might say something like “pitäiskö juoksennella vähäse?”

          But it is a good feature we have, yeah. Imagine trying to learn all those, whereas now they just come more or less naturally. (For that wordmonster, it takes a bit of concentration and I’m still unsure whether I typoed or not but whatever.)

          • whaleross@lemmy.world
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            22 days ago

            Not the same thing. The complete sentence in English would be “do you want to frolic with me?”, which in Finnish is mashed together in a single word as the example given above. The chaining is something like “frolic-aimlessly-us-youwanna?”, though not by words but by endings.

        • dafo@lemmy.world
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          22 days ago

          It’s a similar story for Swedish and German for example. Not exactly the same as Finnish, but the whole mashing words together for them to make better sense. I’m starting to think that English is the odd one out.

          One example could be “kommunikationsdepartementssekretariatsanteckningar” (communication department secretary’s notes). But an English example would be where Swedish, German, I guess Finnish, would say “blackboard” instead of “black board” to remove the ambiguity while English mostly does the latter.

          • herrvogel@lemmy.world
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            21 days ago

            Compound words are very different than agglutinative conjugation though. In such languages, you don’t just mash words together, you also modify them to encode all sorts of extra information into one word. You can form full, grammatically correct sentences that way. Can’t do that with compound words because you can’t compound them into a complete sentence.

            A famous, powe example is the word “çekoslovakyalılaştırabildiklerimizdensiniz” from Turkish, which is like Finnish in that regard. It’s a complete sentence that means “you are one of those who we have managed to make a czechoslovakian”. The object, subject, verb, tense, and more are all in there. Obviously that’s quite a bit more complex than word together-mashing.

            • dafo@lemmy.world
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              21 days ago

              This is above my linguistic pay grade as I’m barely able to string together a coherent sentence when working, but, I think the moral here is that English is a crap language (at the very least very messy and lacks qualities found in other languages).