Differences between English and your native language

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Anonymous

#493239 Wed, 26 Mar 08 04:48 PM

I see what you mean. That sounds interesting - what is the Finnish word, and what is its derivation?

Anonymous

Alienvoord

#493240 Wed, 26 Mar 08 04:49 PM

I see what you mean. That sounds interesting - what is the Finnish word? Do you know its derivation?

Alienvoord

Joined on Tue, Jul 25 2006

Toronto

Full Member (315)

I'm a Canadian English speaker

Cool Breeze

#493489 Thu, 27 Mar 08 08:31 AM

Alienvoord
I see what you mean. That sounds interesting - what is the Finnish word? Do you know its derivation?

The word is käsite. Actually zebra crossing isn't a very good example because the word is usually applied to abstract things. Main principle would be a better example. In Finnish it's a compound. I am pretty sure käsite is derived from käsi (= a hand) and a verb käsittää. Centuries ago the verb had a rather concrete meaning: "to touch and feel with hands". When one did that, one got an idea about the shape and size of an object. Over time the meaning changed and became more abstract. These days the verb has lost its original meaning completely and it now means "to understand".

I wish people living in the Far East would give examples of differences between English and their native languages as I know very little about them.

Cool Breeze

Joined on Fri, Apr 7 2006

Helsinki, Finland

Senior Member (2,857)

The coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco.- Mark Twain

Verbs

Alienvoord

#493613 Thu, 27 Mar 08 02:38 PM

All the online Finnish-English dictionaries gloss käsite as "concept". I guess you would disagree with that.

Alienvoord

Cool Breeze

#493621 Thu, 27 Mar 08 03:02 PM

Alienvoord
All the online Finnish-English dictionaries gloss käsite as "concept". I guess you would disagree with that.

I don't know whether I should agree or disagree. You (among others over the years) have given me reason to think it's not a very good word in all contexts. If I can use concept in the contexts I have described in my previous posts, the word is fine.

Cool Breeze

Mosca

#494821 Mon, 31 Mar 08 07:31 AM

CalifJim
I speak American English, and, in contrast to "English", I never use the words shall, may, ought, or whom.

might is pp of may? 'might' I keep hearing all the time?

Mosca

Joined on Wed, Jun 20 2007

New Member (40)

------- "It's your language, I'm just trying to use it... ", Victor Borge

American English, Whom

Cool Breeze

#501125 Tue, 15 Apr 08 08:07 PM

There are fewer prepositions in Finnish than in English. Quite often, it is possible to place a preposition before or after the word it modifies. If the preposition is after the noun, it is called a postposition. After all, it is after the word it modifies. (Latin post = after) The noun is in the genitive in these cases:

Kävelin yli kadun. / Kävelin kadun yli. (= I walked across the street.)

Cool Breeze

Genitives, Nouns, Prepositions

Cool Breeze

#524319 Sat, 07 Jun 08 10:02 PM

Word order is fairly free in Finnish. However, people don't put words in just any order. Some collocations usually occur in poems and lyrics of songs only. Let's take an English sentence as an example: Spring has come again. In Finnish the four words - there are four words in Finnish as well - can be in any order. Changing the word order never produces a question in Finnish. I think that only about six or seven of the possible combinations are actually normally used. No word order is ungrammatical, though, and therefore the words may occur in any order in a poem.

If I use the English word order, the sentence is: Kevät on tullut taas.

Cool Breeze

Word order

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