Finnish | Lingoblog

NOW THAT’S WHAT I CALL LINGUISTIC CHRISTMAS

21/12/2023 by Maria Jørgensen

It’s Christmas-time again – and what would this time of year be without Christmas music? A lot of us start counting the days ’till Christmas from the moment “Last Christmas” surprises us in a shopping center sometime around November 20^th– and let’s just admit it: We can’t get enough of Christmas songs!

Or maybe Christmas music just isn’t your thing. Is it really possible to listen to ”All I Want for Christmas is You” throughout December without losing your mind, you might be thinking. I mean, I’d say it is, but… I get it. You need something new – something different! I’ve dug around on the internet and asked Twitter for help, and now I’m happy to present … ↪

Is she biased? Are you?

13/06/202310/09/2018 by Telma Peura

Gender equality in machine translation

Many times I have heard of my weird – or original, as I like to say – mother tongue, Finnish. It belongs to the same language family as Hungarian but is geographically isolated in the North, and not related to the neighbouring Nordic languages nor Russian. However, I’ve always been proud of the uniqueness of my language.

Each language has its unique way of capturing and categorizing the world, but in the case of Finnish, one could rather talk about non-categorizing: Finns don’t have articles nor grammatical genders, like “a” and “an” in English, or like feminine and masculine forms in French. In fact, there is no apparent gendering almost at all in the language. … ↪