Oh my! And I thought Czech was crazy. Though ... actually ... quite a few of the things you said about Finish could be said about Czech (and other slavic languages as far as I know) as well. We flex the nouns, the pronouns, the adjectives, the numerals (they are considered separate from nouns as they are flexed differently) and the verbs by means of suffixes, we do not use articles, we allow sentences missing subject, there are fourteen noun cases in Czech (though I bet the usage doesn't match), the word order is relatively free.

The "kahdeskymmenesensimmäinen" scares the heck out of me though. It's awfully long. Especially since the parts get all joined together. We don't do that in Czech. "Twenty" is "dvacet", "one" is "jedna" (or "jeden" or "jedno", Czech does have genders), "twenty one" is "dvacet jedna". We likewise to have to change all the parts when going between ordinals and cardinals ("dvacátý první"). And we do flex the numerals, "in the twenty first chapter" would be "ve dvacáté první kapitole". We still do this though, no English-like simplification. Tenses are something I would rather not go into. I don't think I could explain that even if I tried.

It's strange that it seems Czech and other Slavic languages have more in common with Finish than with English even though the official language evolution trees say something else. I guess it's because languages are fairly promiscuous and mix and match like mad.

Jenda
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In reply to Re^2: The Germanic language form by Jenda
in thread The Germanic language form by Win

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