@tkoola That “jo” “Ё” thing is fascinating. Here in Aotearoa New Zealand the Māori alphabet has short and long vowels, marked with a macron: a and ā, for example. They are significant. For decades though (at least) many people, including map-makers (and me until a few years ago) have ignored them. Finally, as the Māori language is being taken up more, at last they are starting to take their place.
@Miraz we have long and short vowels distinction as well in Finnish (Estonian has three distinct vowel lengths) and it is one of those things that trip language learners coming from Germanic or Slavic languages
@tkoola Since I never managed to grasp the language of grammar etc, what does "long and short vowels distinction" mean? "musta" reminded me about "musta pekka" but I see that it's something completely different than what I seem to remember it was about - a special kind of sausage. So apparently I misremembered.
@jemostrom musta pekka at least is an old card game (with very 50's families and a name sake African character depicted in a way one would expect from the 1950's 😒), it was also a brand of black pepper cheese and a licorice brands. All those are going away understandably. Musta makkara however is a blood sausage that strongly associates with city of Tampere
@jemostrom long and short vowel distinction means that mere difference in vowel length can change the meaning of the word. Examples:
- saari (an island) - sari (that Indian dress)
- kuusi (fir tree or number six) - kusi (😳, better not use it)
- sää (weather) - sä (short for sinä, you)
Writing kind of makes it easier than it is to hear those differences.
If you come with language that doesn’t have this, it is very easy to miss it and it requires a lot of practice to get it right. My spouse has studied Finnish 10+ years and constantly makes mistakes in this area
@tkoola I assume that musta pekka is the same as "Svarte Petter", strangely enough I never associated the card game to any racism - but I was a kid at that time (I don't think I've seen one since I was 10 or so).
Ahh, "makkara", now I remember. The mother of my first wife comes from the Swedish speaking area south of Turku somewhere (I don't remember where anymore ... it was a long time ago) and when we visited the area, musta makkara was an important part of the visit.
@tkoola @jemostrom I started to think about long and short vowels in English then got sidetracked, but want to keep this in sight. We do use them in spoken English — for emphasis and to otherwise mark out a word as special. There's a difference between “Oh, the cat did it?” and “Oh, the caaat did it?”. The second one lengthens the vowel and implies all kinds of things such as a shared knowledge that the person did it and is blaming the cat, or a skepticism or suggestion that ‘cat' really means something else. I do want to think more about this.
@Miraz @tkoola we have the same but there are also things like Tom (namn), tom (is empty), töm (empty xxxx, or rein) that I've heard English speakers having a problem with. My first advisor (from the US) once told me that couldn't hear the difference between a, å and ä, or ö and o ... especially when you add different dialects and the same kind of intonation as you describe.