Some particularities of Estonian
Trip Start
Jul 04, 2005
1
5
37
Trip End
Jul 18, 2005
Brussels,
Belgium
Tuesday, June 7, 2005
The Estonian language, together with Finnish and Hungarian, belong to a language group called the Finno-Ugric languages. They are linguistically unrelated to what linguists call the Indo-European language family, which includes all other European languages except Basque, Turkish and Maltese. Speakers of English or another Indo-European language (such as Spanish, Russian, or German) who learn Estonian, or speakers of Estonian who learn an Indo-European language, face a harder task than speakers of one Indo-European language learning another.
Estonia has the highest practical rate of literacy in the world.
Source : www.wikipedia.org
Some of the particularities of the Estonian language :
1. They possess 14 cases (German only has 4) :
Nominative, Genitive, Partitive, Illative, Inessive, Elative, Allative, Adesive, Ablative, Translative, Terminative, Essive, Comitative, Abessive
2. There is no grammatical gender
3. Words do not resemble any Indo-European language
examples : na ei tule veel, tulen natuke hiljem = I'm not coming yet, I'm coming a little later
Kuidas käsi käib = How are you?
4. They add suffixes to make us of their different cases. This means that a simple word like "ilm" (world or weather) can take on any number of suffixes, like ilmadesse, ilmale or ilmadega to name but a few.
Conclusion : I have a long way to go if I ever want to master this language ;-)
Comments
Language
If you want more challenge, you can study finnish together with estonian, and we have 15 cases :)