Who's to decide the future?

<If English morphology is difficult, surely there must be dozens of other inflected forms I have never encountered.>

There, again, you are sayin "It is this way, is it not?" "Agree with me, please!" Just accept that it is easy for you and others may find it difficult.

I have had an interesting exchange of views with Cool Breeze before about how difficult English is.

A relic of the days when people still played LPs and tapes, I have a "Complete midi hi-fi cleaning kit". It includes a compact disc cleaner and a carbon fibre cleaner. I have always felt that these two phrases go a long way to illustrate the way an analytical language like English works. At first glance the two phrases are similar. In each case the first word qualifies the second and the first two words qualify the third. However, in the first case the first two words compact disc tells us what the cleaner is for and in the second the first two words carbon fibre tell us what the cleaner is made of. Now it is perfectly posible that there is some machine of which carbon fibres are an integral part and that they need to be kept clean - you would use a carbon fibre cleaner and in that case the words carbon fibre would tell you what the cleaner is for. It is only the context that allows you to know what is intended when you encounter the phrase carbon fibre cleaner. None of this presents a problem for native English speakers, but I would imagine that it does for learners of English.

The phrase carbon fibre cleaner is quite interesting as all three words are nouns, but the first two are used adjectivally without any change in form. Such a construction is not possible in some languages. You would either have to stick an adjectival ending on or connect the words with a preposition. Indeed, in a language like French the difference between a carbon fibre cleaner for an LP and a carbon fibre cleaner for cleaning carbon fibres would be made explicit by two different construction; something like cleaner of fibres of carbon for the former and cleaner for fibres of carbon for the latter. I would be interested to learn from Cool Breeeze whether such a distinction can or must be made in Finnish.

Hi Forbes

Your analysis of carbon fibre cleaner and compact disc cleaner made me think for a long while. Actually, these words, their Finnish equivalents and un untold number of other Finnsh words have been spinning in my head all day.

Finnish uses a lot of compounds, and I think I should mention that first. One concept almost always means one word is needed for it in Finnish. Therefore the Finnish equivalents of your two phrases are compounds: hiilikuituharja for the first and levynpuhdistin or cd-levynpuhdistin for the second. The components of the compounds are in different colours.

The first difference I detect is the fact that we don't use the equivalent of cleaner in our word hiilikuituharja. Harja means brush, not cleaner. As to your last question, I can't think of any examples of the kind of distinction you have in mind. Finnish sometimes uses the nominative case for the first part of the compound and sometimes the accusative case is used, but using the accusative does not necessarily mean the first part is the actual object. Of course it often is. In the above Finnish compounds levyn is an accusative and hiili and kuitu are nominatives. Levyn is understandably in the accusative since it indicates the object of the cleaning.

Two more examples:
eduskuntavaalit
presidentinvaalit

The first word means general election (of MPs for our parliament) and the second means presidential election. In the first example the nominative is used (eduskunta) while the accusative (presidentin) is used in the second example. In both compounds the first part is definitely the object of vaalit. I have no idea why the nominative is used in the first example.

On a more general level, I don't think phrases like compact disc cleaner cause problems for Finnish learners of English. One hears a phrase and learns its meaning and seldom thinks what it consists of. A typical mistake for a Finn would be to write these phrases as one word the way they are written in Finnish: compactdisccleaner. On the other hand, some Finns write Finnish words incorrectly as two or three words, which might lead them to get the English phrases right.

As there are thousands of languages, it may well be that speakers of some of those languages encounter the kind of difficulties you described, though.

Cheers
CB