Introduction to Estonian

Is Finnish a difficult language?

Andrew Chesterman

professor of translation theory in the

Department of Romance Languages

Universitas Helsingiensis

(retired)

$ curl -qs http://www.helsinki.fi/lehdet/uh/499l.html|
sed 's/Finnish/Estonian/g'|
lynx -dump -stdin

Is Estonian a difficult language?

It's not so hard to acquire a basic conversational ability: Estonians will notice anyway that you are not a native speaker - so there's no point in hiding it - and they will not worry if you make mistakes as long as they can see what you mean.

It´s the fact that Estonian is so different from other languages that makes it so fascinating.

One of the special features of the language that I have noticed is its "situation-centredness". By this, I mean the Estonian tendency to describe events and actions in terms of situations.

I think this is rather typical of Estonian, and even of the way Estonians think, the way they see the world. Psychologists might call this a "field-dependent" way of cognition: that is, there is a tendency always to look at the big picture, to see things as a whole, rather than as isolated details.

The Estonian tendency to highlight a state of being rather than a personal action is also apparent in the way Estonians refer to agents

- or actually how they avoid referring to agents.

The Estonian passive is really an impersonal form which allows the speaker to hide the agent: the subject of a passive verb is left unspecified.

After all, why stress a human agent, since a person is only a tiny lump of bacteria in the middle of the vastness of nature...?

Yet another strange thing about Estonian is t

he difficulty of applying the term "subject" to some structures. Here is a simple passive sentence:

Mina pean seda tegema. ('I must do it.')

Is "seda" the subject (in the nominative)?

Or the whole phrase "seda tegema"?

Or do we have a genitive subject ("Mina")?

Or is there no subject?

Maybe we should stop thinking in terms of "subject" altogether...

You might say that native English writers tend to value a reader's time, and so they try to make the text as easy as possible for the reader to understand

- as if they were writing advertisements.

Estonian writers, on the other hand, tend to value the reader's intelligence: they assume that the reader does not need a lot of extra guidance

- this would be patronizing, they feel.

The last special feature I will mention here is the

Estonian use of metatext.

Metatext is text about text, signposts like "firstly, however, in conclusion, as we saw in section 4, we shall return to this in chapter 5, finally I would like to make three points..."

These signposts help to orient readers, to let them know what is coming next and to remind them of what was said before, and to show the logical links between different parts of the text.

Estonian writers use much less metatext than e.g. English writers, and that this is something that may make their English texts hard to read.

The last feature I will mention is the Estonian use of metatext. Estonian writers use much less metatext and that this is something that makes their English texts hard to read.

Estonians do not use metatext,

so it is hard to understand them.

Is English a difficult language

for Estonian to learn?

It's not so hard to acquire a basic conversational ability:

it will be noticed anyway that one is not a native speaker..

BUT

One has to be specially trained:

to describe events;
to refer to agents;
to name subject;
to give a lot of extra guidance;
to not assume that other party is intelligent;

And to be explicit ;)

And i am have not recived this kind of training ;(