Tere (Hi)! OK, it's time to talk a little about the Estonian language, bits and pieces of which we're attempting to learn--at least for purposes of courtesy if not actual comprehension. Not that courtesy doesn't count or isn't real: we've always believed that we should at least try to speak a little of the language in countries where we are guests, and it's nice to be understood as trying as well.
But Estonian is a challenge, as implied in an earlier post. First, it's a member of a different family of languages than those spoken by most Europeans or those (like many Americans) whose people came from places that spoke a European language. Estonian is a part of the Finno-Ugric language family, rather than an Indo-European language (which includes Germanic, Romance, and Slavic languages, among others, including Persian and Hindi). The other two main languages in this family are Hungarian and Finnish (to my surprise, the languages spoken by the indigenous Sami peoples of the far north of Scandinavia also belong to this family). See the map below for a bit more on this--it's not super-clear, but the Finnish language area is in pink, Hungarian in green, and Estonian in yellow.
This means that knowing English, or a bit of German or French or Spanish, doesn't give you much help in understanding Estonian. We're pretty much starting from scratch, except for the words Estonian has borrowed as a result of centuries of being a small place on the edge of larger empires, trade (a long-term member of the Hanseatic League), foreign occupation, modernization, or the ease of communicating across borders with new electronic media.
But in addition to being from a language family unfamiliar to English speakers, the Finno-Ugric languages also just seem more complicated grammatically. For example, many languages have some "cases" (confession: I'm getting in over my head here), which means the form of a noun or pronoun may change depending on how it's used in a sentence. An example in English might be "I, my, me," reflecting the three cases we have in English. Even these three can be confusing for native speakers (my students sometimes mixed up when to use "I" and "me"). German has four cases, and Latin eight.
But Estonian has 14, and Finnish 16! This sounds overwhelmingly complicated to me: would you either have to grow up in an Estonian-speaking household to get the case right when speaking Estonian, or be so deliberate and careful in how a word was being used in a sentence you might never get it out? No wonder we're still at the "hi," "thank you," "please," and "one-two-three" (uks-kaks-kolm) stage of our conversational attempts.
What does this mean in actual speaking, this variety of cases? An example might help. Suppose we have the words for "beautiful house," a noun and its adjective. In English, those words would be constant, while we would indicate the context with other words like "to," or "from," or "on top of," things like that. In Estonian, the words themselves (noun and adjective) take different endings.
In other words, they would be spelled different depending on whether we are saying a beautiful house, into a beautiful house, in a beautiful house, from a beautiful house, onto a beautiful house, from on top of a beautiful house, turning into a beautiful house, up to a beautiful house (but not going in), like a beautiful house, or without a beautiful house (and so on). Wow. A bit daunting for the beginning speaker! (Thanks to Urmas Sutrop's informative booklet Estonian Language for these and other examples.)
At one level, I love how human beings have been so creative in using and changing their languages, and how complex, nuanced, and attentive a language like Estonian is in helping us see the subtleties of our experience. One language might help us see something different about our everyday life than another, providing a new lens or framework for seeing (and shaping?) the reality that counts for us. Estonian has a word for "anticipation of thunder in the evening," for example, which seems to indicate a connection to natural life it's easy to lose track of in our modern world. At another level, as someone who's often felt challenged trying a new language, knowing more about Estonian makes me wonder if I'll be better learning about the language than actually using it. Fortunately, even my meager attempts to use a little Estonian are usually well-received, or at least afford a moment of humor for someone in their busy day.
To continue: In addition to cases, there are also additional vowels in Estonian, nine rather than the five in English. That's not such a big deal, as lots of languages have extra or different vowels from English, or extra or fewer consonants (Estonian doesn't have the English c, f, q, w, w, or y). And it can be charming, or sound lovely, so there's a little built-in intrigue or motivation to make the most of it. There often seem to be words with more vowels than consonants, or double vowels. And Estonian has 36 different dipthongs, or vowel combinations, just to make things more interesting.
The word for "edge of the ice" (and think about what it means about where we are, that this culture might actually have a word for this concept!) is jäääär. We pay rent monthly on our apartment here, the word for which is kuuüür . (Note that those "umlauted" a's, o's and u's are three of the extra vowels in Estonian--they are separate vowels, different letters, and don't come in the order one might expect when looking them up in the dictionary.)
On the bright side: unlike Thai or Arabic, in which Barbara and I have taken courses during our overseas programs, Estonian is written in "regular" (Latin) letters. And it's pretty phonetic: if we pronounce the letters right, we can say the words more or less correctly, so words sound like how they look (like German and Spanish, not like English or French, in my experience).
Now if we only spoke Russian, as do over a quarter of the people here, we might have additional skills to work with. Perhaps Barbara can revive her Serbo-Croatian? But that's another story. In the meantime, we will have to depend on the kindness of strangers, as we so often have when far from home--in this case, local folks who, luckily for us, often speak at least some English.
Paikest! (Sunshine!) Bruce
p.s. Congratulations if you finished this particular post. You are eligible to receive two (2) Continuing Education Units (CEU's) for this achievement.
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