@MaggaraMarine

3 months ago

1. The Swede's guess "scissor" isn't actually that far off, because in Finnish, it would be "saksi" (well, usually that's plural, so "sakset", just like in English it's "scissors", but a single "scissor" is "saksi", which doesn't sound that different from "kaksi"). 2. It seems like the Icelandic word comes from the same root as the English word "fiddle", whereas in the other languages, it derives from the Italian word "violino" (I guess the Finnish word comes from Swedish where "o" is commonly pronounced similarly as "u" in Finnish, which is why it's spelled as "viulu" instead of "violo" - and the "in" ending is quite "un-Finnish", which is most likely why we got rid of the "in", and just replaced it with "u"). To my understanding, "violin" is used to refer to the classical violin, whereas "fiddle" is a more colloquial name for the instrument (folk musicians would probably use that word). 4. "Yliopisto" also essentially means "high school" (just like in Icelandic). "Opisto" means institute/academy (or school) - literally a "place of study" ("opiskella" = to study; "opiskelija" = student). "Yli" is literally "over/above", but in this context it should be understood as referring to university being the highest form of education. I don't think the other languages borrowed "university" from English, though - it's most likely borrowed from Latin (which used to be the "academic language"). We also use the word "koulu" in Finnish, and it's a loan word from Swedish (skola, koulu - sounds pretty similar). "Opisto" is a more Finnish word, because as I said, it relates to other words like opinnot, opiskella and opiskelija (studies, to study and student). We also say "oppia", which means "to learn", and "opettaa", which means "to teach", so learning, teaching and studying (and the place where you study - opisto) are all related words in Finnish. I think this feature actually makes the Finnish language quite simple - we tend to derive a lot of related words from a single word. In English, these are all completely separate words (study, teach, learn, school). 5. In Finnish, we don't have a separate word for "to be named" (which is "heta" in Swedish), similarly as in English. We either say "minun nimeni on" = "my name is", or "minä olen (nimeltäni)" = "I am (named)". Then again, our "olla"-verb is quite versatile. We don't have separate "to be" and "to have" words either - it's all just "olla". 6. We do also use "katti" (which again is a loan word from Swedish). 8. Finnish uses a lot of compound words, which is why the Finnish words may seem long. Also, we tend to use suffixes instead of prepositions, which makes some words seem longer. This also makes it possible to express a lot with only a couple of words, which in other languages would take a lot more words.

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