My mother-tongue is Swedish with a bit Norwegian, and my father-tongue
Finnish, but Finnish I had to learn by myself and now I've almost lost
it "again"...:)
In order to relate to something that has at least a distant relation to
the thread, I would say that the combination of Swedish and Finnish
gives a good basis for learning Pali or Sanskrit pronunciation - in
(especially Western, "half-Norwegian") Swedish I think there actually is
a somewhat similar way of word-intonation + supradental consonants +
phonological distinction of length (yes, questionable). I guess that's
why many Indian languages sound extremely funny to Swedes. By the way,
'sata' is indeed borrowed in Finnish from some Indo-Iranian language.
Sorry everyone for this Scandinavian-centered off-the-thread discussion!


Gunnar Gällmo skrev:

>
> --- Den sön 2010-02-14 skrev Anton Bjerke <anton_bjerke@...
> <mailto:anton_bjerke%40yahoo.se>>:
>
> > By the way, if I haven't introduced myself earlier, I'm a
> > Phd-student of
> > Helsinki University (Altaic linguistics), with an interest
> > in Buddhist
> > thought and language in a broad sense.
>
> Is your mother-tongue Finnish or Swedish? Your name seems to indicate
> the latter, but you never know.
>
> Anyhow, Non-Indoeuropean Finnish - like Pali, but unlike modern
> Indoeuropean Swedish - still makes a difference between short and long
> syllables, so Finns have and advantage over Swedes when it comes to
> pronouncing short vowel+whort consonant, as in "sata" - which happens
> to mean "one hundred" in both languages.
>
> Gunnar
>
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