Languages crash courses

Hi,

arka asked me to teach some finnish to him, so i'll put some stuff here so others can see it too if they wish.

Anyways for small background, finnish is a fenno-ugric language (don't know the proper term just guessing based on the finnish expression). It belongs to the same group as estonian (eesti) and hungarian as well some smaller languages. It's not in anyway related to indoeuropean languages such as english or german as far as i know. Also I think not related to slavic languages like russian. Almost every word is pronounced like it's written. We use "endings" in words instead of prepositions (like in or at in english), so our words can get very long.

I did say unrelated but we have borrowed a lot of words from german and swedish. Also anglisms are heavily infesting the language currently. It is allowed to say "googlettaa" if you search something with google or "chattailla" if you chat with someone. (like our language authorities accept these expressions, because they kinda must)

First thing arka asked was what is fire as I was playing Agni. The classic elements in the order fire-earth-air-water are tuli-maa-ilma-vesi in finnish. Then in clan chat i said he lives in Intia which is located in Aasia. Those are clearly borrowed from other languages and just changed a little.

Greetings in finnish are moi corresponding to hi in english, then there is hei which is more like hello. Then you can also say hyvää huomenta/päivää/iltaa corresponding to good morning/day/evening. Our word for bye is näkemiin or you just say moi or hei.

I think that's enough for now.

From arka I would ask what is hindi? Is it like suahili in africa, like a common language to all, or what is the nature of it? Any local dialects?

And if the dutch people come here, I would like to know was it easy for you to learn english? (dutch is indoeuropean too, right?) I know it was easy for me to learn english, swedish and german simultanously because they have so much similarities.

dichroist

Nice work Dichroist!..Few words that I can easily remember now are: tuli (fire) , maa (earth) , moi (hi), hei (hello).

I can talk a bit about Hindi. In hindi we say 'maa' for mother, interestingly( across all regions and languages). Agni is more a Sanskrit or traditional hindi word. Its a pious way to say fire. Otherwise we just say 'aag' for fire. All must be knowing 'namaste' for hi or welcome or bye.

Its difficult to teach hindi as we have different words for the same thing. Ex: water can be 'paani' (contemporary) or 'jal' (traditional). In our pronounciation of English, we like to speak the words as they are with not much emphasis to phonetics.

Note: Their is a small widget on the forum home page in the left bottom corner. You can change the language of everything on forums!

Like dichroist already said estonian and finnish languages belong to the same group. And as we are neighbours too we have A LOT of similarities.
For example

English: fire-earth-air-water
Finnish: tuli-maa-ilma-vesi
Estonian: tuli-maa-õhk-vesi (there's an estonian word "ilm" meaning "weather" - which is still closely related to õhk/ilma in meaning)

Some other English to Estonian stuff:
Hello! - Tere!
Please! - Palun!
Thanks! - Aitäh!
Edge of the ice - Jäääär (jää-ice;äär-edge) :D:D:D
I love you - Ma armastan sind

So as you saw from my previous post and Dammu's above, we have letters in our alphabet english doesn't have. How they are pronounced?

Ä is pronounced like the a in the english word "bad" and Ö like the i in "girl".

Just in case that seemed odd.

SMITE gamemodes in finnish:
conquest = valloitus
assault = hyökkäys
arena = no word really, borrowed as "areena"
joust = turnaus/turnajaiset
siege = piiritys
match of the day would be "päivän peli"

Also some phrases Dammu posted:
we don't have a please sadly, we use our thank you which is "kiitos" . A german immigrant called Roman Schatz who has lived like 15 years in Finland said this is part of the reason we seem rude abroad, because we don't have the culture those words please (and bitte) bring. Also I love you is said "minä rakastan sinua"

Thx for anyone reading this.
dichroist

PS. anyone familiar/interested in forum games like ban the person above or word association threads. Also we could pick apart some SMITE videos here, sadly so much of them are of conq matches.