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is one of the infinitives of käy, pronounced in the same way as Scottish people say cowdah. This is both the custom among dairy farmers of not speaking to outsiders, and an elaborate padded seat for riding around on the backs of cattle.

posted at: 16:23 | path: /baltism | permanent link to this entry

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This is the sound at the very beginning of Hancock's Half Hour, isn't it?

posted at: 20:44 | path: /baltism/redwhitered | permanent link to this entry

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This Key is for the use of Teachers only and is issued on the understanding that it shall not get into the hands of any Pupil.

Hee hee. But there are no macrons in the answers. Qualitative, not quantitative, I suppose.

posted at: 21:55 | path: /baltism/redwhitered | permanent link to this entry

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I don't want to suggest that the considerable age of some of my Latin and Greek textbooks meant that I learnt either language properly. I've just tried to guess the length of the vowels in vir, femina, canis and feles and got half of them wrong. And the short -a in femina I only managed because it was nominative, not ablative, a fact I picked up at university.

posted at: 21:42 | path: /baltism/redwhitered | permanent link to this entry

If you had school textbooks with introductions referring to the "Four Concords" and "boys" to the exclusion of "girls", then you'll be as disappointed as I was to learn that the Latvian words for "sailor", jūrnieks and matrozis, are masculine in form as well as masculine in gender.

Mathiassen's A Short Grammar of Latvian got my hopes up by declining māsa, "sister" (fourth declension), and then saying

Care should, however, be taken for nouns designating males. They are of masculine gender (cf. p. 40) and have the ending -am (not *-ai) in the dative sg., e.g. puika : puikam boy...

Not a nauta to be seen.

The fifth declension is better value, though. Bende, a hangman, is epicene.

posted at: 21:30 | path: /baltism/redwhitered | permanent link to this entry

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As a learner of Finnish, I reckon that "myself" in sentences like "I reckon that "myself" in sentences like "I reckon...

... is used essively, myself." is used essively, myself." is used essively, myself.

Similarly, in "Wash trousers inside out", "inside out" is to be understood essively (being inside out) rather than transitively (until inside out). I don't know what the barrier to inversion of a pair of trousers is, but I suspect it depends on the material.

posted at: 11:15 | path: /baltism | permanent link to this entry

People will scare you by saying that Finnish has fifteen cases. I reckon, and Google, treated as a corpus, agrees with me here, that three of these are lexicalized fossils.

How many can we add to English? There's a definite allative in -wards (homewards and towards) and what I shall call a graduative in -wise (stepwise, dropwise, piecewise). I'm sure you can think of more. Piecemeal could count as a graduative in -meal, but the opposite of piecemeal is wholesale, not wholemeal. "He removed gliadin-containing grains from his diet wheatmeal."

posted at: 11:04 | path: /baltism | permanent link to this entry

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Beware pie, nest, ogle, bite, ass and logs, because they aren't what they seem.

Apelsīns, ķiploks, ļaudis and gurķis, on the other hand, are.

posted at: 21:55 | path: /baltism/redwhitered | permanent link to this entry

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Concomitantly, there's a letter on a similar subject in the Guardian Weekend section, about halfway down the page, or halfway across in the print edition.

Two things occur to me: firstly that the unhelpful geographical expression "European philosophy" is probably a thinko, or, let's be generous, a subbo, for "Continental philosophy", as opposed to analytic philosophy, and secondly, is proficiency in a language "only" measurable in how you cope in a social situation? We know where that would leave Jane Austen, so where does it leave everyone else?

These people think they can say what they like when they write in to newspapers because the newspapers never print their letters. Well.

posted at: 15:53 | path: /baltism/insidecolinshead | permanent link to this entry

No. It's the lack of practice. I've internalized much of the grammar, have a vocabulary of about a thousand words, I think, can order drinks and say who I am to check in at a hotel, but for anything more complicated, such as writing an e-mail or properly understanding an article in Postimees, I'm in my own private Chinese Room, looking up most of the words in my rather poor dictionary and having to refer back to the textbook for the grammar I don't know. Unless I make a proper effort to read back over what I've written I won't understand it.

If Standard Grade Estonian existed and was like Standard Grade Latin or Greek, this would be fine, but for a living language it won't do.

You can escape from the Chinese Room with practice, as long as there's only one of you. Whether you can identify when you escaped is another question.

posted at: 12:31 | path: /baltism/insidecolinshead | permanent link to this entry