• Dasus@lemmy.world
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    10 months ago

    First, I’d like to identify Finnish as a Finno-Ugric language, more than a uralic one, because “uralic” is very broad, just like, say, “Indo-European languages”. There’s several distinction within both groups.

    But yeah, there are quite a lot of grammatical cases, I can see that yeah. I wouldn’t bother learning Finnish if I wasn’t born with it, lol.

    My point is rather that English calling French out on something linguistic. English is three languages in a trenchcoat masquerading as one.

    But also, getting the conjugation wrong won’t really be offensive to anyone, whereas confusing he/she just because your brain is unused to having to specify such things and your mouth is unused to the “sh” sound in she, and ending up misgendering someone, could be. Even accidentally.

    “She sells seashells on the seashore” is a very challenging tongue twister for Finns.

    Also, note how I can write a sentence like “hän menee kirjastoon”, meaning “[3rd person nongendered singular] goes to the library”, but if you run that through a translator to English, the translator will have to make up a gender. And not surprisingly, the default is the masculine one. (Down with the patriarchy and all that.)

    Although this also means you’ll lose information when translating to Finnish. Ups and downs.