in reply to [OT] Recruiting Non-English Speakers for a Perl-based Web Project

Nice project!

And ++ for the use of thy for T-V distinction. It's not used for Irish though, but the pronoun "do" which is the singular "your" is used in the sentence. And "ba mhaith liom" is the idiomatic expression for "I would like" but "ba" is "would be", "mhaith" is "good" and "liom" is "with me".

Speaking of possessive pronouns, I'm surprised by the lack of them in Finnish, I would expect the use of the suffix -si (hymysi). And as far as I know pronunciation of voyels is very constant in Finnish, and does not depend of their position in the word, and should therefore be transliterated consistently. I'd write "hümü" for "hymy" (don't double the m, since consonnant length is significant in Finnish) and leave "nähdä" unchanged (to be consistent with herään).

I am a native (or a even a good) speaker of neither of those two languages :P (and you already have French covered :) )

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Re^2: [OT] Recruiting Non-English Speakers for a Perl-based Web Project
by golux (Chaplain) on Feb 22, 2019 at 14:26 UTC
    Hi Eily,

    Thanks for your comments, and for the Finnish suggestions which I've updated the page with.

    Et j'espère que tu me pardonneras if I poke fun at your "consonnant length is significant in Finnish" as you accidentally misspelled "consonant" with too many consonants :-)

    I'm not very familiar with Finnish, other than being told years ago by a Russian friend from Estonia that, Finland and Estonia being so close in proximity, the languages Finnish and Estonian are easily understandable by both populations. It's one of those cool things about languages, and prompted me to include language family considerations on the page, as studying languages from related families is very helpful.

    Another example is Belarusian, Russian and Ukrainian, the voices for which were provided by a friend and coworker who speaks the first two, while his wife speaks Ukrainian -- it's very apparent how similar they are when the three are viewed together.

    Oh, and I just saw in my email that my Jordanian friend has provided audio for the Arabic, so I'll be updating that shortly. Edit: Arabic now added!

    say  substr+lc crypt(qw $i3 SI$),4,5
[reply]

      Et j'espère que tu me pardonneras if I poke fun at your "consonnant length is significant in Finnish" as you accidentally misspelled "consonant" with too many consonants :-)
      Yup, trop de consonnes :P.

      My understanding about Finnish and Estonian was rather that it was obvious that they are languages from the same family, but that they're not more mutually understandable than French and Italian would be. One of the differences is that writing and pronunciation have remained pretty rigid in the main Finnish (by opposition to the familiar/spoken versions), while Estonian has undergone some of the transformations you see in other languages (where sounds are approximated, or lost, like Going to > Gonna, Want to > Wanna).

      If you want similar languages I would advise looking at Danish, Icelandic, Norwegian and Swedish. With Icelandic closer to the old Norse, and the last three being basically sister languages (:P). One of the funny things about Norwegian (well, one flavour of it), is that it has kept the Danish spelling of words even when the pronunciation matches Swedish more closely. So in some cases, it looks like Danish but sounds like Swedish :D .

      Speaking of language trees, you can look at Minna Sundberg's work (well, that page specifically, but the whole comic is pretty good :) ). Where you can see that Finnish, isn't even on the same tree as other european languages :)

      Edit: my friend in Finland just confirmed, it should be hymysi rather than just hymy (to have the "thy" meaning).

[reply]
        Hi Eily,

        Thanks for correcting the Finnish! I've fixed that in the Finnish section, though I still need to update the audio (Editnow done). And although Google Translate says that "hymy" means just "smile", I can see from their translation for "hymysi" that the noun incorporates the possessive pronoun as well. Very interesting.

        I like the language tree illustration by Minna Sundberg; will have to study it more.

        By the way, Finnish is one of the languages I don't have a native speaker's voice for (other than Google Translate's voice). Would you mind asking your friend if she/he would be interested in providing it? :-)

        Cheers, golux

        say  substr+lc crypt(qw $i3 SI$),4,5
[reply]

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