All Languages are Fluffy But Some are More Fluffy Than Others

Photo by Alvan Nee on Unsplash

“Mama, why do you like Thai so much?” Maya asked me the other day.

“Because it’s a language where you use your voice to change the meaning of a word. You know how in English you say dóg or dôg, and it doesn’t matter how you use your voice, it still means the same thing…  in Thai it matters…”

“I know!” She said. “That’s like Chinese. I remember when I was learning Chinese last year… [she was learning Chinese on Duolingo last year] húa means “flower” and hua means… something else…” 

She has a point, though. I do love Thai more than any other language I’ve encountered recently.

I’m a trained linguist, and I bristle when simple mortals say things like “Spanish is the most beautiful language!” or “Polish sounds too harsh.” or “French is the most elegant/musical/pretentious language.”

But whatever, people are allowed to have their unprofessional reasons to like or dislike things they don’t know anything about. Biologists probably scoff at us because we like baby seals more than slugs. We don’t know anything about either, but one is fluffy and cuddly, and the other one isn’t and that’s enough for us to state our preferences.

And the truth is, I do like (and dislike) languages for certain reasons, once I get to know them. I like Thai because it’s tonal which is precisely the reason I expected not to like it. I used to think I’d never touch a tonal language with a ten-foot pole. As a language learner, I thought they were too hard. And as a linguist, I thought they were too boring. As a linguist, I was more attracted to things that are structurally complex rather than acoustically complex.

But now I love it. I think it’s genius that you can turn a dog into a horse with the mere power of your vocal cords. True, my vocal cords were mightily confused at first, and had no idea what the heck I wanted of them, 25 years after we quit the choir, but now that we’re over that mountain it feels like a superpower.

But I also love how straightforward the rest of the language is. It’s like one of those ‘secret’ languages that we used to invent when we played James Bond as kids.

Case in point. The Thai word for ‘what’ is à-rai. You place it at the end of the sentence. Like this:

But if you add the question word mǎi at the end, it becomes a yes-no question, and now à-rai means ‘something’:

Am I the only one who gets goosebumps contemplating this beautiful simplicity?

Going back to Finnish after spending one two three weeks immersed in Thai was like going back to an abusive relationship after you’ve seen what it could be like.

All these conjugation tables. Why, Finnish, why do we need to have 49 different ways to say ‘what’ and then another 49 to say ‘something’ when some languages make do with just one word for all of these?

It was also the first time since the Russian invasion of Ukraine that I felt guilty being a Russian speaker. Because Russian also kind of does that to people, only I wasn’t aware of all the suffering this caused language learners until now.

Finnish (like Russian) has something called cases. “Case” is the special form that each noun must take depending on its role in a sentence. English, by the way, also has cases, but only three and they only show up in personal pronouns. (Old English had 5 and they applied to all nouns.)

The words ‘he’, ‘him’, and ‘his’ are all different cases of the pronoun he.

He (nominative case) is used when it’s the subject of the sentence. Him is used when it’s the object (accusative case). His denotes possession (genitive case).

Now imagine that there are not three but 15 different forms you have to memorize for every pronoun and noun in the language.

Why 15? Haven’t we covered all the ground here with subject/object/possession?

No, no. There is a lot more.

There are many different kinds of relationships that an object can have with the verb. In English, these relationships are mostly expressed with the help of prepositions (words like ‘with’, ‘at’, for’ etc…. ‘I am angry at him’, ‘I think about him’, ‘I am happy for him’). Finnish, instead of a preposition (or sometimes in addition to the preposition), adds a special ending to the noun, changing its case.

Here are just four of the 15 different forms that the Finnish 3rd person pronoun hän ‘he/she’ can take:

Why do verbs ‘love’ and ‘like’ require different case endings for their objects? Nobody knows. Linguists sometimes try to figure out if there is a system to the madness that is language because we want to know how it is organized in the brain (do babies learning Finnish have to figure out a specific rule or do they simply have to memorize it on a case by case basis (pun not intended) ?) But there isn’t always a logical explanation for why things happen the way they do, and as a learner, it is best to just memorize things like this.

On the other hand, there is fluffiness to be found in this complexity too.

Mikä and Mitä are two different ways to say ‘what.’ Mikä is the nominative case form, Mitä is the partitive case (just another of the 15 cases).

You use them differently.

For example, if your friend comes to work with a new travel mug, and you point at it and ask: Mikä tuo on? ‘What is this?’ Your friend will know you’re referring to the mug and might say something like “Oh, that’s my new mug. My mom gave it to me for my birthday.”

But if you ask the same question using the word mitä (Mitä tuo on? ‘What is this?’) she’ll think you’re asking about the liquid inside the mug. So she might reply Tämä on teetä. “This is tea.”

That’s because mikä (nominative) ‘what’ is used to refer to countable nouns (nouns that represent countable objects — two mugs, three slugs, four seals). And mitä (partitive) refers to mass or abstract nouns (nouns that can’t be easily counted — liquid, water, tea, energy, happiness, wisdom).

And that is so cool that I’m even willing to make peace with the 15 cases.

As for the Rusyn language, I can’t talk about its relative fluffiness just yet because my relationship with it is greatly complicated by the fact that it reminds me too much of Russian. I don’t read anything in Russian in my everyday life, and suddenly for the past few days, I have been trying to get myself used to looking at these print-outs with Cyrillic letters every day.

It’s taking me places I didn’t intend to go.

So all this talk about seals and slugs was really to distract everyone from the fact that I haven’t made any progress on this language that was supposed to make my life easy, because my brain is refusing to cooperate. My brain goes WHY ARE YOU MAKING US MEMORIZE RANDOM INCORRECTLY SPELLED RUSSIAN WORDS WITH AN OCASSIONAL NON-CYRILLIC LETTER THROWN IN? Something that usually activates when I’m learning a new language just hasn’t activated here.

It did activate my desire to curl up under a warm blanket and watch Soviet-era Russian cartoons all day.

This was not my plan.

Meet Cheburashka, the most famous and fluffiest Soviet cartoon character.