ayearinlanguage: A Year in Language, Day 55: Estonian Estonian is the language of Estonia, a geograp
ayearinlanguage: A Year in Language, Day 55: Estonian Estonian is the language of Estonia, a geographically Baltic country. Estonian is in the Finnic branch of the Uralic family, and as one may expect is closely related to Finnish. On a personal note it is also the language of my great-grandfather. Estonian may well be a good example of a language at a critical state of change. Like Finnish, Estonian is typically considered an agglutinative language. Agglutination is the linguistic term for one pole on a sliding meter of “morpho-semantics”; basically the less information is packed into a single affix (aka. a morpheme) the more agglutinating it is because generally this means more affixes have to build up, or agglutinate, for full meaning. Packing more information into a morpheme pushes the language to be “synthetic”. So when in Turkish one adds two suffixes onto a noun, one for case and the other for plurality, that’s agglutinating, when Latin adds one that tells you the case, number, and gender of a noun, that’s synthetic. Like I said, Estonian is typically considered agglutinating, like Finnish. However sound changes in the language have caused sounds at the ends of words to become less distinct or disappear entirely. Estonian typically makes use of suffixes, so these sound changes are directly focuses on the focal point of grammar in the language. As the sounds erode the once separate morphemes are becoming fused, so that in the future it may be the case that Estonian is fully synthetic. Only time will tell. Like Finnish, Estonian has a robust case system, 14 by traditional count! It also has an impressive number of vowels. It only has nine monopthongs (typical vowels of only one “pure” sound) but over 30 dipthongs (Vowels that consist of two closely fused sounds)! -- source link
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