Thursday, August 16, 2018

4. Speaking languages

How to say Charlie speaks English in Finnish?
We know the verb puhua, to speak.
The word for the English language, is englanti.
So could we say: Charlie puhuu englanti?
No. In Finnish, we always need to add -a or to the end when we talk about speaking a language.

Charlie speaks English:
Charlie puhuu Englantia.

The reason that we need to add the ending, is that Finnish has no set word order.
So instead of:
Charlie puhuu englantia.
we could also say:
Englantia puhuu Charlie
or:
Puhuu Charlie englantia.
And they all mean roughly the same thing (Charlie speaks English).

In the end, we could get confused who is the speaker and which is the language being spoken, so we add a little -a or to the end of the language to avoid the confusion.
It's called the partitive ending. Here it doesn't have anything to do with parts though. The most important thing, is to add it to the end of the language.

 Which ending do we add then, -a or -ä?
The same rule applies here as in the case of nationalities:
If the word has A, O or U in it, the ending is -a.
If the word has none of these three vowels, the ending is -ä.

Like this:
ruotsi: Swedish (language)
Minä puhun ruotsia. I speak Swedish.

viro: Estonian (language)
Sinä puhut viroa. You speak Estonian.

japani: Japanese (language)
Hän puhuu japania. He/she speaks Japanese.

venäjä: Russian (language)
Puhun venäjää. I speak Russian.

hindi: Hindi (language)
Puhut hindiä. You speak Hindi.

tšekki : Czech (language)
Jakub puhuu tšekkiä. Jakub speaks Czech.

For one language, though, there is an exception. The Finnish language not only gets the ending -s like all the other languages, but also a small vowel change: suomi -> suomea.

Minä puhun suomea. I speak Finnish.
Puhun suomea. I speak Finnish.
Sinä puhut suomea. You speak Finnish.
Puhut suomea. You speak Finnish.
Hän puhuu suomea. He/she speaks Finnish.
Jaakko puhuu suomea. Jaakko speaks Finnish.

So let's try this with the 10 most spoken languages in the world:
Li puhuu kiinaa.
Daniel puhuu espanjaa.
James puhuu englantia.
Saumya puhuu hindiä.
Mariam puhuu arabiaa.
Pedro puhuu portugalia.
Rafi puhuu bengalia.
Viktor puhuu venäjää.
Yui puhuu japania.
Jasmin puhuu pandžabia.

Next lesson:

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