this post was submitted on 26 Oct 2023
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Eesti keelt pole olemas
Tõsi
Sidenote, but as a Finn it's always so fun to read or hear Estonian. Very often I can get at least the gist of what's being said, and with this phrase I was like 75% sure of what it meant (the 25% comes from the fact that many Estonian words look familiar but actually mean something completely different than what I'd expect.) Finnic languages are pretty rare with like 7 million speakers total, so getting this "oh this language sounds so familiar" feeling isn't exactly common for us.
Somebody actually did a fun video on this where a Finn and an Estonian tried to guess what the other was saying.
Sounds like the relationship between German and Dutch. To me as an Austrian, Dutch sounds like a drunk northern German speaking half English.
I studied German around 3000 years ago and Dutch feels somewhat more intelligible to me (at least when reading it, heh) compared to Estonian; it really does sound like someone took English and German and made them do unspeakable things to each other. German & Dutch definitely are a good enough comparison in any case, and I guess eg. Spanish, Portuguese, Italian and maybe Romanian might be too.
But even eg. Italian and German are related, even though it's not immediately obvious. You Indo-European speakers are surrounded by related languages, and here's us, the Estonians, the Sámi and a bunch of dying minority cultures in Russia speaking our crazy moon speaks that nobody understands.
I feel you. When I go to Hungary, my brain breaks. In most surrounding countries, I can sort of guess common words. "Exit" is more or less the same word (vychod) in all nearby Slavic languages for example. And then there's Hungarian where it's probably szönözökémül or something.
Lol szönözökémül. I get what you mean though, Hungarian is such a distant relative of Finnish that it's not mutually intelligible with Finnish in any way, so it feels just as alien to me. The grammar has some familiar constructs and there's like a handful of words that, when they were specifically pointed out to me and I was told it's the same as some word in Finnish, I went "oh right I can see how those are related" but I would never have noticed them otherwise.
At least Finnish has related languages but eg. Basque speakers will never hear a foreign language that makes their brain go "I totally understand this! Trust me nothing will go wrong!", and how sad is that?