🚀 go-pugleaf

holy moses what a crosspost. note where i put followups; note also the
linguistics groups i _didn't_ put in the followups.

Edward, in <ant10130...@efffonts.demon.co.uk>:
>In article <5fcp48$rju$1...@news04.deltanet.com>, Eric Chevalier
><URL:mailto:et...@deltanet.com> wrote:

>>Several years ago I worked at a shop where one of my co-workers was from
>>Finland.  We had several talks about the language, and she claimed that 
>>the only European language that was closely related to Finnish was 
>>Hungarian!  To this day I've wondered what historical quirks caused that
>>to be true.

>Well, nobody knows, but Finnish and Hungarian languages do not belong to
>Indo-European group of languages - that means they are different from all
>European and large number of Asian languages. Think about it - English and
>Sanskrit have a lot in common, English and Finnish not...

>If I remember coreectly, these are the only languages that do not
>have separate words for "he", "she" and "it".

Finnish does indeed not differentiate between he and she (h�n), his
and hers (h�nen), but it does make a difference between persons and
"it"s.

of course, in colloquial spoken usage, referring to third persons as
"it"s is excusable as a not necessarily derogatory familiar, but you'd
not put it in writing.

...and yes, that does allow for quite some number of confusing puns
and wordplays. translating to and from Finnish can get challenging at
times.
-- 
        "...it's all wrong
         but it's alright..."          -- Clapton