Finnish-Estonian intelligibility

Skippy   Fri Jun 05, 2009 4:28 pm GMT
I was told by a Finnish friend that they don't have significant amounts of vocabulary in common, but my Estonian friend said Finnish wasn't too tough to learn. So how much does knowing one help in learning the other? Are suffixes relatively similar or is the grammar as different as the vocab?

Obviously, being related, I understand their grammar will be similar... Thanks!
apple   Fri Jun 05, 2009 8:36 pm GMT
I've heard mixed reviews about their intelligibility. It also depends on the region that the speaker is from. But yes one will help with the other, but not as much, say, as Spanish and Portuguese.
Skippy   Sat Jun 06, 2009 5:53 am GMT
That sounds right to me. But do their morphologies overlap significantly or is it just the general understanding of grammatical concepts that help one with the other?
apple   Sat Jun 06, 2009 6:28 pm GMT
Since there is some intelligibility, yes it is certainly more than just the grammatical concepts that overlap.

Compare the numbers: yksi, kaksi, kolme, neljä, viisi vs: üks, kaks, kolm, neli, viis.
to apple   Sun Jun 07, 2009 3:50 pm GMT
Compare: English:one,two,three,four,five,six,seven,eight,nine ten.
German:ein,zwo (zwei),drei,vier,fuenf,sechs,seben,acht,neun,zehn.
Dutch:een,twee,drie,vier,vijf,zes,zeven,acht,neggen,tien.
Are English,German and Dutch intelligible languages? Maybe German and Dutch,but not English.
apple   Sun Jun 07, 2009 4:33 pm GMT
Compare Finnish numbers without the final vowel to Estonian ones:
yks - üks
kaks - kaks
kolm - kolm
nelj - neli
viis - viis

Absolutely identical, if you realize that ü is the same sound as y, and j = i.
cool   Sun Jun 07, 2009 4:45 pm GMT
Estonian belongs to the Baltic Finnic branch of the Uralic languages. Estonian is thus closely related to Finnish, spoken on the other side of the Gulf of Finland, and is one of the few languages of Europe that is not Indo-European. Despite some overlaps in the vocabulary due to borrowings, in terms of its origin, Estonian is not related to its nearest neighbours, Swedish, Latvian and Russian, which are all Indo-European languages.

Estonian is distantly related to Hungarian (there is no mutual intelligibility between the two). It has been influenced by Swedish, German (initially Middle Low German, later also standard German), Russian, and Latvian, though it is not related to them genetically.

Like Finnish and Hungarian, Estonian is an agglutinative language, but unlike them, it has lost the vowel harmony of Proto-Uralic, although in older texts the vowel harmony is still to be recognized. Furthermore, the apocope of word-final sounds is extensive and has caused a shift from a purely agglutinative to an inflected language. The basic word order is Subject Verb Object.
pear   Sun Jun 07, 2009 5:00 pm GMT
Compare:
Finnish:
Jokaisella on täysin tasa-arvoisesti oikeus siihen, että häntä oikeudenmukaisesti ja julkisesti kuullaan riippumattomassa ja puolueettomassa tuomioistuimessa hänen oikeuksiaan ja velvollisuuksiaan määrättäessä tai häntä vastaan nostettua rikossyytettä selvitettäessä.
Estonian:
Igal inimesel on tema õiguste ja kohustuste määratlemiseks ja temale esitatud kriminaalsüüdistuste põhjendatuse kindlakstegemiseks täieliku võrdsuse alusel õigus sellele, et tema asi vaadataks avalikult ja kõiki õigluse nõudeid järgides läbi sõltumatu ja erapooletu kohtu poolt.
http://www.lexilogos.com/declaration/index_english.htm
Where is mutual intelligibility?
pi   Sun Jun 07, 2009 6:04 pm GMT
According to this (unreliable source):
http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/464391/what_is_mutual_intelligibility_and.html


"Finnish and Estonian ARE mutually intelligible with each other. Estonians tend t understand Finnish better than Finns understand Estoinan though"
gram   Wed Jun 10, 2009 3:44 pm GMT
>> Obviously, being related, I understand their grammar will be similar... Thanks <<

Well yes the grammar of the two is similar, but it's not "obvious" just because they are related. English and Russian are also related, but their grammar is not very similar.