Time, tense, and gender in Estonian
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Size-wise, Estonia (45,339 sq. km; 17,500 sq. m) is much larger than Philadelphia (369.59 sq. km; 142.7 sq. m), but, in terms of population, Philadelphia (1,603,797) is slightly bigger than Estonia (1,313,796). I have been to Estonia, and was utterly captivated by the wealth of its art and architecture, the depth of its history, the quality of its education, and the accomplishments of its people. Among many other distinctions, Estonia is at the forefront of research in genetics, which is what brought me there during my period of research on the mummies of Central Asia.
Now, as you will discover from this post, Estonia is worthy of wonder for its fascinating language as well. Some of the special features of Estonian are well presented in the following article that was published a couple of days ago:
Puzzle Monday: How To Be on Time in Estonia
by Alex Bellos, Atlas Obscura (November 7, 2022)
——
In Estonia, there is no sex and no future.
This has nothing to do with the very real decline in fertility rates in this European country of 1.3 million people on the Baltic Sea. Rather, it is about the Estonian language, which has no grammatical gender and no future tense.
Estonian is spoken by about 1.1 million people, and is notorious as one of the most difficult European languages for English speakers to learn, along with its siblings in the Finno-Ugric language family, Finnish and Hungarian.
One particularly complicated part of Estonian grammar is its nouns. Estonian nouns may have no gender (just like English but unlike languages based on Latin), but they have 14 grammatical cases, meaning that nouns may change in 14 different ways depending on their use in a sentence. (The translative case, for example, indicates a change of state, requires the suffix –ks, while the abessive case, indicating the absence of the noun in question, adds the suffix -ta.) English, on the other hand, has no grammatical cases.
As for verbs, to express something that might happen in the future there is no separate tense. Rather, you use the present tense and then a temporal marker, such as a specific time. So, in order to say, “I will solve this puzzle at 8:30 p.m.,” you say, “I solve this puzzle at 8:30 p.m.,” and context does the rest.
However, this statement presupposes you can determine how Estonians tell time, which is different from how English speakers tell time….
The article concludes with a graphic puzzle showing how Estonians tell time, which appears to be quite different from the way English speakers tell time. Fortunately , the challenging graphic is accompanied by a link to its solution — which is both elegant and fun.
Selected readings
- "The Udmurtian code: saving Finno-Ugric in Russia" (12/26/05)
- "Udmurt advances" (5/24/12)
- "Ilse Lehiste" (12/27/10)
- "Ilse Lehiste again (12/28/10)
- "For Ilse Lehiste" (1/10/11)
- "The Linguistic Diversity of Aboriginal Europe" (1/6/09)
[h.t. John Rohsenow]
~flow said,
November 11, 2022 @ 8:49 am
I'm not sure I follow along AtlasObscura's author in this:
> One particularly complicated part of Estonian grammar is its nouns. Estonian nouns […] have 14 grammatical cases, meaning that nouns may change in 14 different ways depending on their use in a sentence. […] The translative case […] requires the suffix –ks, while the abessive case […] adds the suffix -ta. […] English, on the other hand, has no grammatical cases.
How's that different from having lots and lots of different prepositions, especially if we're looking at an primarily agglutinative grammar (which I believe Estonian can be classified as), IOW a language where stems remain unchanged or change regularly when affixed, and individual affixes likewise have few forms that are chosen from based on morpho-phonological rules (like e.g. vowel harmony and presence/absence of a stem vowel at the point-of-contact in the case of Turkish).
Now I'd guess that case suffixes are not everything it takes, grammar-wise, to make an Estonian sentence grammatical, but when one looks at a list of [English prepositions] with over 130 'prototypical prepositions' alone one can not help but wonder whether English shouldn't be considered, by this measure, as more difficult than Estonian when it comes to joining a verb and a noun. There's so much to choose from!
As for the writer's assertion that "English […] has no grammatical cases", well, I guess that's another interesting point to discuss; there's "I can see her" vs "she can see me" and "my father's friend" vs "my friend's father", although the first pair is only valid for a tiny part of the language (the pronouns) and the second part is arguably more like a 100% regular clitic postposition than something akin to what in 'more fusional' IE languages tends to be much, much more convoluted and harder to get right.
* [English prepositions] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_English_prepositions
jin defang said,
November 11, 2022 @ 9:41 am
Ever since I found out that Chinese doesn't have tenses, and that "ta" was written without gender until fairly recently, I've been in favor of simplifying western languages. However, 14 different changes for nouns isn't what I had in mind. And telling time in Estonian is way too complicated. Didn't like the "logical" solution in the PDF since it depended on too much guesswork beyond the vocabulary given. We can do better, linguaphiles!
Garrett Wollman said,
November 11, 2022 @ 10:36 am
Most of the quoted text above could equally have been written about Finnish, which should of course not be surprising. I'd also note that English also lacks a future tense by the modern definition.
David Marjanović said,
November 11, 2022 @ 11:58 am
That's if "the modern definition" is "it only deserves to be called a tense if it's synthetic", i.e. in a single morphological word, as found in Latin and Latvian for example, or in French and Ukrainian (and, in the perfective aspect, Russian).
I prefer to say that English has three future tenses. They're all analytic (i.e. put together from clearly separate words), but they're all fully grammaticalized as tenses. One is the will construction, with a more prognostic meaning; another is the going to construction, which expresses greater certainty; the third is the about to construction, which is more of an imminent-future tense. That's much more than German has, whose prognostic werden covers only part of the English usage of will while the plain present tense is used for all the rest.
David L said,
November 11, 2022 @ 12:22 pm
I learned a bit of Finnish when I lived there briefly many years ago. What was difficult about learning the numerous noun cases was that you have to learn the declension of various classes of noun rather than just banging together any old noun with any old preposition as one does (loosely speaking) in English.
A Brit who had lived in Finland a long time and become fluent in Finnish told me that it's a hard language to learn initially, because there are so many rules to master in order to construct even simple sentences. But once you've absorbed those rules, any new word you come across fits into the same pattern. With English, by contrast, it's easy to start because you can learn a handful or words, start putting them together, and be reasonably well understood. But English becomes more difficult as you proceed, because there are so many subtleties of word choice and word order and so on that don't follow any obvious rules but simply have to be remembered.
This is an oversimplification, of course, but I think there's some truth to it.
Terry K. said,
November 11, 2022 @ 12:50 pm
It strikes me that "“I solve this puzzle at 8:30 p.m.”, to be understood as the future (without context clues), requires the language variety to have a reliably used past tense. Which is presumably the case. And which is the case in English and Spanish which both can use the present to talk about the future. "I am solving this puzzle at 8:30 pm". (Requires knowing that's not the current time, but doesn't require context to know that's the future, not the past.) Or, an example that to me feels more natural "I'm going to the store at 8". Or Spanish, "Voy a la tienda a las 8". That is, a clock time only marks something as the future when there's something marking it as not in the past. Like not using the past tense.
Sergey said,
November 11, 2022 @ 1:56 pm
The ways to describe time look very much the same as in Russian. Even "pool" meaning "half" is very similar to Russian "pol". Although I would say that the expressions with "quarter", let alone "three quarters" in Russian are mostly found in the older books, and not used much any more.
BTW, I would say that the most confusing way to describe time is British/Irish: when they say "half-six", does it mean "half past six" or "half to six"? The people used to the American way of telling time get confused by this too. The right answer is "half past six", which for a Russian (or Estonian) speaker is completely counter-intuitive.
PeterL said,
November 11, 2022 @ 2:20 pm
And similar claims can be made about Japanese, perhaps even going further … no future tense, no singular/plural(*), no relative pronouns, no gender, no articles ("a","the"), no agreement between subject/verb, ~11 noun cases(**), only a handful of irregular verbs, etc.
So what? (I've been told that Korean and Turkish have similar characteristics, and no doubt there are other languages.
This doesn't make Japanese all that much easier to learn (mainly because of the large borrowed vocabulary from Chinese IMHO [like English's use of Latin/Greek in compounds on steroids], but – like any language – there are plenty of other difficult parts), nor does it make the society score high marks on gender discrimination even if the language itself doesn't distinguish(***).
(*) Plural can be shown, but it's usually omitted
(**) Usually called postpositions, but are they functionally different from Finnic cases? は/wa・が/ga・の/no・を/o・に/ni・へ/e・と/to・より/yori・から/kara・で/de・や/ya
(***) Yes, there are typically male and female ways of talking, but the language itself has no grammatical gender.
Lukas Daniel Klausner said,
November 12, 2022 @ 5:25 am
The Estonian way of describing time seems to be exactly the same as (Southern German), which has “Viertel zwei” for 13:15, “halb vier” for 3:30 and “drei Viertel acht” for 7:45.
M said,
November 12, 2022 @ 5:41 am
@ Lukas Daniel Klausner (or anyone else who may know):
In the Southern German way of telling time, how does one say 'five minutes after one', 'twenty minutes after two', 'five minutes to two', and 'twenty minutes to two'?
Philip Taylor said,
November 12, 2022 @ 7:11 am
Sergey — "BTW, I would say that the most confusing way to describe time is British/Irish: when they say "half-six", does it mean "half past six" or "half to six"? ". Although I have never heard a Briton or an Irishman say "half-six", that does not mean that it is not used, simply that I have never encountered it in real life. But on the assumption that it is used, I would say that with 99.9% certainty it always means "half past six", since "half to six" is not a British idiom (and also, I believe, not an Irish one).
Victor Mair said,
November 12, 2022 @ 7:50 am
From Peter Golden:
Estonian friends tell me that they understand Finnish without problems, “only a few endings are different.” I am in no position to judge. Perhaps Juha Janhunen can say something about this.
Victor Mair said,
November 12, 2022 @ 7:52 am
From Juha Janhunen:
On Finnish and Estonian: Basically, Estonian is Finnish with a number of additional morphophonological rules. Because of these rules, Estonian at the surface is much more fusional and much less agglutinative than Finnish. An Estonian speaker will understand Finnish rather fluently, while a Finnish speaker needs at least a couple of months to make sense of Estonian. I remember that as a child I did not understand Estonian.
Irrespective of this, during the Soviet occupation of Estonia there was widespread passive bilingualism in Finnish in northern Estonia, where Finnish TV broadcasting was visible. This bilingualism has now disappeared, and young Finns and Estonians tend to speak English with each other, which is, of course, a most unfortunate situation. With the loss of Russian as a language learnt at schools, foreign language knowledge in Estonia has deteriorated, with most young Estonians knowing English as their only foreign language. To my experience the situation is better in Latvia, especially Riga, where many young people of the student generation are still fluent in Latvian, Russian, German, and English.
Rachael Churchill said,
November 12, 2022 @ 8:28 am
“I solve this puzzle at 8:30 p.m." – English does this too. "The flight lands at 8:30.” "What time does the train leave?" "We attack at dawn."
Ray O'Leary said,
November 12, 2022 @ 10:03 am
In answer to Philip Taylor half-six is the standard way of saying 6:30 in Hiberno-English (my idiolect at least).
Lukas Daniel Klausner said,
November 12, 2022 @ 11:16 am
@M: »In the Southern German way of telling time, how does one say 'five minutes after one', 'twenty minutes after two', 'five minutes to two', and 'twenty minutes to two'?«
“Ein/Dreizehn Uhr fünf” or “fünf nach eins” // “zwei/vierzehn Uhr zwanzig” or “zwanzig nach zwei” // “fünf vor zwei” or “ein/dreizehn Uhr fündundfünfzig” // “zwanzig vor zwei” or “ein/dreizehn Uhr vierzig”.
Though I personally *have* been trying to introduce “Drittel drei” and “zwei Drittel zwei” for 14:20 and 13:40, respectively. ;) (Also, “Sechstel” for increments of plus/minus ten minutes. ^^)
Philip Anderson said,
November 12, 2022 @ 5:53 pm
@Philip Taylor
I would say half six at least as often as half past six or six thirty. It’s the most informal form, and short for half past six – as you say *half to six is impossible. I don’t see it as having any regional, class or age association, although it may it may not be common for your generation.
Andrew Usher said,
November 12, 2022 @ 9:01 pm
I don't believe 'half six' is ever used in America; we only have the universal 'half past six'. For the quarters, I would use, as I think are most standard across the English-speaking world, '(a) quarter past' and '(a) quarter to' (the indefinite article preceding quarter is optional), but there there is some variation in the prepositions. 'After' instead of 'past', and 'til' or the illogical 'of' for 'to' can be heard.
However, for reading the current time the standard today is to say the minutes always – no doubt due the universality of digital clock displays – and only in planning/estimating do the 'half' and 'quarter' expressions remain possible in colloquial use.
To us – or at least to me – it is the European convention of always reckoning from the next hour that is strange, and so is their habit of writing the time in the 24-hour system but speaking it in the 12-hour system. And the former is ambiguous too: should not 'viertel acht' and 'drei viertel acht' be 7:45 and 7:15 rather than the reverse? – one can see how either would make some sense.
k_over_hbarc at yahoo dot com
Coby said,
November 13, 2022 @ 12:42 pm
Andrew Usher: The basis for the "European" system is that the hour number, though given as a cardinal, is actually an ordinal, so that "one" means the first hour after noon or midnight, and "a quarter of one" is the first quarter of the first hour.
For a time system based entirely on quarters, see the Wikipedia page "Catalan time system" (I have trouble inserting links in LL).
Incidentally, most languages do the same thing with year numbers. "The year one" is the first year after the moment dividing BCE and CE. The only languages I know that use ordinals for years are Latin and Polish.
Philip Taylor said,
November 13, 2022 @ 12:59 pm
Coby — to insert links here, you must enter them as pure HTML. For example, a hyperlinked "Wikipedia entry for the Catalan Time System" would be entered as <A href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catalan_time_system">Wikipedia entry for the Catalan Time System</A>.
Terry K. said,
November 13, 2022 @ 2:30 pm
@Philip Taylor and Coby
Although your (Philip Taylors) HTML looks correct, something's not right with the actual link, because it goes to
https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/Wikipedia%20entry%20for%20the%20Catalan%20Time%20System
I think it works just to paste in the URL, and the software turns it into a link (so long as the http:// or https:// is included).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catalan_time_system
Terry K. said,
November 13, 2022 @ 2:31 pm
And it's even smart enough not to turn http:// and https:// into links when they aren't followed by anything.
Terry K. said,
November 13, 2022 @ 2:37 pm
Okay, that's weird, my first comment disappeared (after I saw it posted). Where I noted that Philip's link is messed up, and that you can just paste in the URL (with the http:// or https://) and it gets turned into a link. Which makes my comment just above out of place.
Jarek Weckwerth said,
November 13, 2022 @ 2:44 pm
@ Coby: The only languages I know that use ordinals for years are Latin and Polish.
So do Russian, and presumably (at least some) other Slavic?
Jarek Weckwerth said,
November 13, 2022 @ 3:12 pm
*does
Coby said,
November 13, 2022 @ 5:52 pm
Jarek: Perhaps. Polish is the only Slavic language that I actually know.
I remember that in Polish even one's age was, when I lived in Poland, often expressed as ordinal, e.g. "I am in my forty-second year" (jestem w czterdziestym drugim roku) in preference to "I have forty-one years" (mam czterdzieści jeden lat), unless one's birthday is recent.
Raul said,
November 14, 2022 @ 6:09 am
As a Southern Estonian, I can assure Finnish is mostly understandable for me without having ever really studied it, to the extent of translating Finnish poetry. I think they have one more case officially (descriptions differ), although we have also some that are not universally active and described in schoolbooks but are still used creatively (e.g. instrumental for 'how?' or 'in which way?'). We've had more exposure to German and Russian, too.
Looking from the other side of the glass, for me as an Estonian, the most irritating feature in Indo-European languages is gender. It makes absolutely no sense. What kind of sex maniac needs to determine the gender of a chair, the Moon, a day? Why? And then have fights with other Indo-Europeans for misgendering the Moon. On the second place, I'd put vocative. Having a special grammatical case so you can address, e.g., a week, feels like a mental health issue. Compared to that, Sumerian ergative almost makes sense. (And this complaint comes from a culture where talking to trees is still nothing particularily unusual.)
Andy Stow said,
November 14, 2022 @ 12:22 pm
@ David Marjanović:
"I prefer to say that English has three future tenses. They're all analytic (i.e. put together from clearly separate words), but they're all fully grammaticalized as tenses. One is the will construction, with a more prognostic meaning; another is the going to construction, which expresses greater certainty; the third is the about to construction, which is more of an imminent-future tense."
You missed, "I'm fixin' ta…"
Andrew Usher said,
November 15, 2022 @ 8:26 am
Coby:
Yes, I think I've got it now. I knew already that there was sense behind it, but never thought to put it that way; though I'm familiar with the words 'cardinal' and 'ordinal'. Then it could be said that English is more consistently cardinal than other European languages; the way we speak of a person's age is obviously another time-related example.
wanda said,
November 15, 2022 @ 7:16 pm
I grew up in Connecticut and rarely ever heard even "half past six." Then my mom and I go to Ireland, get off the plane, go to the rental car place, and ask people what time it is. (This is before cell phones.) They say, "half past." Just "half past." No number. My mom is a fluent English speaker but not native, and she can barely decipher anything anyone is saying, and we just got off a plane, and we have no clue whether it's even morning or afternoon, and no one will tell us the actual hour. Then finally someone told us half past 3, and we had to ask whether that meant 2:30 or 3:30. It was a lovely vacation after that though, although the entire trip, if anyone said anything to my mom, I had to translate from English to English for her.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that "half past six" is evidently far far more common in Ireland than in the US.
Rodger C said,
November 17, 2022 @ 3:05 pm
"half past six" is evidently far far more common in Ireland than in the US
American here; used it all my life.
Rodger C said,
November 20, 2022 @ 2:18 pm
It occurs to me belatedly that the above hasty comment sounds rude. I only meant that I'm so familiar with "half past" that it never occurred to me that other Americans might not know it. I wonder if this has anything to do with my coming from a part of the country largely settled by Ulster Scots like me.
Terry K. said,
November 21, 2022 @ 10:29 am
There's a difference between being familiar with it and using it. I'm American, and "half past six" doesn't sound strange to me, but it's not something I'd ever day. (For whatever it's worth, I've no sort of British or Irish ancestry.)
Philip Taylor said,
November 21, 2022 @ 5:35 pm
So what would you say if asked the time at (say) 18:30, Terry ? "Eighteen thirty" ? "Six thirty" ? "Half six" ? Or what ?
Oatrick said,
November 22, 2022 @ 2:24 am
"outta my brain, on the 5:15!" #QuarterHours #WhoLyrics
Oatrick said,
November 22, 2022 @ 2:31 am
My favoritest part of learning German time-telling was C.T. and S.T. (cum/sine tempore). C.T. being 15 minutes after the hour; S.T. being on the dot. (in academic settings). As described here (in German):
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akademische_Zeitangabe
Quinn C said,
November 22, 2022 @ 1:03 pm
“Ein/Dreizehn Uhr fünf” or “fünf nach eins” // “zwei/vierzehn Uhr zwanzig” or “zwanzig nach zwei” // “fünf vor zwei” or “ein/dreizehn Uhr fündundfünfzig” // “zwanzig vor zwei” or “ein/dreizehn Uhr vierzig”.
The "xx Uhr yy" form is more formal, but becoming more common in everyday contexts.
But more importantly I wanted to add that I've met speakers who would say zehn vor halb drei // zehn nach halb zwei (ten to half three // ten past half two) for 2:20 and 1:40. I sometimes parody that by piling up, as in "zehn vor viertel nach halb drei" (ten to quarter past half three) – what time that is is left as an exercise to the reader
Terry K. said,
November 22, 2022 @ 5:17 pm
@Philip Taylor. I'd say six thirty. Or six thirty P M if needed. And if for some odd reason I was needing to give the time in a 24 hour clock, it would be eighteen thirty hours.
Lukas Daniel Klausner said,
November 22, 2022 @ 7:00 pm
@Quinn C: Ah, yes, “zehn vor/nach halb” is quite common, as well. Sorry, I just forgot about that option (maybe 'cause I'm fervently trying to replace it with “(zwei) Drittel” ;)).