Comment on The Serpent's Last Bite

  1. Erdariel on Chapter 2 Sat 01 Sep 2018 02:32PM UTC

    Yeah, frankly most Finno-Ugric languages are rather small and many are endangered. The biggest languages of the family are Hungarian (very distant relative to Finnish, I wouldn't be able to understand even the words that have the same origin), Estonian (very close relative to Finnish, there are many same and similar-sounding words, although not close enough to understand much. But to a foreigner they might sound similar enough that they might not know if I'm speaking Finnish or Estonian), and Finnish.

    But yeah, those three are the big ones, used as the official languages of countries and so on. Then there are many smaller languages, I guess all more or less endangered, such as several Sámi languages (most common is Northern Sámi, but there are are a few others) spoken in Lapland, in Finland, Norway, Sweden and Russia. At least in Finnish Lapland Sámi languages have some sort of official status and technically speaking people have the right to get service in Sámi languages. Then there are Karelian languages, spoken in Finnish and Russian Karelia. Then there are several different ones spoken in certain areas of Russia that I don't remember by name, all somewhere around Ural mountains (which is where the language all Finno-Ugric languages come from probably developed). Oh and then there's Meänkieli, which I think linguistically speaking is a dialect of Finnish (I mean I don't have any more trouble understanding it than I have understanding some other Finnish dialects), but it has some official minority-language status in Sweden.

    But hey, if you wanna watch a Finnish movie with a lot of different dialects, see if you can get your hands on Tuntematon Sotilas with subtitles (I recommend trying to find the 1955 filmatization, directed by Edvin Laine, but tehre's two other filmatizations of Tuntematon too, the newest was made in 2017 but I haven't seen it yet). It's a pretty famous war story, set during Continuation War (part of WWII, not one of Finland's proudest moments in my opinion). A lot of characters die but it's quite nice, at least the 1955 movie. I've never tried to read the original book.

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    1. Luthien17 on Chapter 2 Tue 04 Sep 2018 12:36PM UTC

      Those are a lot of different language variations :-D
      Thank you for the recommendation! I'll write it down, let's see if I can get my hands on it somewhere.

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