Learn Finnish, you'll get to say "in the 1997th" as "tuhannennessayhdeksännessäsadannessayhdeksännessäkymmenennessäseitsemännessä".
Or avoid saying things in that manner to save your sanity, but who am I to judge? "from 1994 to 1997" would colloquially just be "välillä/vuodet ysineljä ysiseiska" to avoid compound words with forty syllables. I had to consult wiktionary to make sure I was inflecting that properly, and I'm native!
9 months ago · 👍 eph, maxheadroom
I consider to write a blog in mixed local (Dutch) dialects, in a radius of 5 kilometers we have about 10 dialects, and exponentially more when you make the radius larger.
colloquail expession can make a strong connection with readers who can make sense of it, but everyone else will probably be severely annoyed. :-) · 9 months ago
@willowf Only ones that you very rarely say in full. Colloquial Finnish is essentially another language and more contrived constructions like this never occur in use, even in formal texts. · 9 months ago
Native speakers of Finnish have to check whether they're inflecting words properly? · 9 months ago
@eph I'm not totally sure. I don't think I have a sense for what "stress" really means, since it's always the same in the language. It's a pretty foreign concept. People don't say long numbers in this manner, usually. Maybe "kolmantenakymmenentenäkolmantena" for 33rd or something, but not much bigger. Mainly the issue is that the morphemes append to each component and so long numbers get substantially longer. · 9 months ago
ha! My ancestors are from Finland and I actually have been wanting to try learning for a while. · 9 months ago
Primary stress always at the inital phoneme too, right? How would that work in a word like
tuhannennessayhdeksännessäsadannessayhdeksännessäkymmenennessäseitsemännessä
? I'm assuming it's rhythmic, but holy moly is that a long word. · 9 months ago