You know more Finnish than you think
20 days ago
- #linguistics
- #Finnish-language
- #Germanic-influence
- Finnish is part of the Finnic language family, distinct from the Indo-European languages predominant in Europe.
- Finnish has borrowed extensively from Germanic languages, including Proto-Germanic, Swedish, and Low German, making some vocabulary recognizable to English speakers.
- Proto-Finnic underwent significant phonological changes due to contact with Germanic languages, including syllable structure adaptations.
- Finnish preserves some Proto-Germanic features lost in modern Germanic languages, such as the masculine singular ending *-az.
- Historical linguistics reveals that Finnish has layers of loanwords from different periods of Germanic influence, including Pre-Germanic stages.
- Finnish modifies borrowed words to fit its phonological rules, such as dropping initial consonants or changing voiced consonants to voiceless ones.
- Examples of Finnish words with Germanic origins include 'kattila' (kettle), 'naula' (nail), and 'sama' (same).
- The Finnish word 'sauna' may have a Germanic origin, derived from a Proto-Germanic word related to 'stack'.
- Finnish preserves ancient vowel sounds from Proto-Germanic that have changed in modern Germanic languages.
- Historical linguistics helps bridge the gap between seemingly unrelated languages like English and Finnish, showing shared linguistic heritage.