@Adam Finnish actually makes a big deal with corresponding pairs of back and front vowels: AÄ, OÖ, UY. It makes it all more consistent if you think of Y as Ü.

I guess the reason we use the letter Y is that there already was a letter for that sound, whereas for Ä and Ö the only option was to modify old letters.

@JoonasIlmavirta It's fascinating how the roman alphabet was applied to represent sounds in different languages. Some seem fairly consistent, and some seem very strange. Some of the consonant combination in Gaelic languages are just bizarre to me. The actual sound could be captured the sounds of letters as commonly applied to all the romance languages, but instead they use them in novel ways.

First example that comes to mind is Samhain. The pronunciation would make me want to spell it as something like sahween, but the spelling makes me want to pronounce it completely differently.

@Adam Many languages have departed quite far from what the letters stood for for the Romans. That includes English, and very inconsistently so.

The writing system has been adapted for each language, but the sounds of the letters are reasonably similar across languages. And I think a major message is that the alphabetic writing system is very successful in general.

@Adam It took me quite a while to learn not to cringe when anglophones pronounce Finnish names.

But to be fair, Finns butcher many foreign names themselves, so the confusion is mutual.

@JoonasIlmavirta I would be pretty hesitant to try and pronounce anything I see in Finnish. There's a band I recently discovered on Spotify who are Finnish. Fortunately only one of the two words in their band name (Oranssi Pazuzu) is Finnish, because all the songs and lyrics are and there's no way I'd even try pronouncing them.

@JoonasIlmavirta I think you could look to the different character sets in Japanese for this. Hiragana fills in gaps where there isn't a kanji for a word, but my understanding is a lot people will use it because they simply didn't learn enough kanji (although this is viewed negatively if you're an adult). It's not really a lettering system and is more of a syllabary, but the function is similar.

@Adam If you ever want to learn, the upside is that Finnish pronunciation is systematic. The system is different from others you may know, but you can pronounce pretty much any word you see if you know the rules.

@Adam I've understood that it's indeed similar. But when it comes to any reforms, the cultural friction would be enormous. I'm happy European writing ended up as simple as it did.

@JoonasIlmavirta I would consider it, assuming I ever feel I reach a level of proficiency in Latin.. :) Does Finnish make use of a lot of compound words? The frequency of long words makes me think it's like German in that regard.

@Adam Yeah, we do compound a lot.

But the morphology is also pretty rich and can produce pretty long words (especially when translated) without any compounds. For example "lähdettyämme" = "after we have/had left".

It's pretty close to nobis egressis, but in Finnish only one word is needed.

@JoonasIlmavirta Interesting. Does that mean that there is word with a similar morphology that means "before we have/had left", etc?

@Adam No, there is no such form for before. There is "so that we leave" (lähteäksemme) and "without us leaving" (lähtemättämme) and "while we leave" (lähtiessämme) and probably a couple I can't recall now.

I was never taught a full list, so I can't recall the forms by reciting them. The system of infinitives is pretty chaotic. There are four infinitives and each has defective case inflection, and only some of the cases can take a possessive suffix.

@JoonasIlmavirta Is Finnish heavily inflected like Latin?

@Adam More heavily than Latin.

@JoonasIlmavirta Wild! And here I thought Latin was heavily inflected.

@Adam Well, just about anything is more heavily inflected than English.

The amount of morphology is also distributed differently. Finnish has way more cases, and more moods but less tenses. And no personal passive in the same way.

@JoonasIlmavirta Personal passive as in something like, "The chair was moved by me"?

(My comments should not be taken as my saying that English is poor. It's just different.)

@Adam I meant as in distinguishing moveor from movetur.

Finnish has a passive, but there is no good agent. There is a way to imitate the by or ab, but it's not very natural. I think the whole idea of passive is different.

@JoonasIlmavirta I've certainly encountered some poor examples of English. ;)

@Adam I'm sure I've provided some...

@JoonasIlmavirta Your English is much better than I've seen from many native speakers. It's probably better than mine! Haha

@Adam The fact that I communicate in writing here hides a lot. It's far easier to get my tongue twisted than my fingers.

@JoonasIlmavirta True enough, and it also avoids pronunciation concerns. I think that was one of the points being made in that question about vowel pronunciation. If you're just reading and writing it doesn't really matter.

@Adam That's true. I just find it very unsatisfactory to read and write without being able to assign sounds to things, even mentally.

@JoonasIlmavirta I feel the same; it's the reason why when I was first starting to try and learn Latin I obsessed a bit on understanding the pronunciation.

@Adam That's a healthy obsession. Everything makes so much more sense if there is even an approximate sound to things. Studying a language just by manipulating strings fails to excite me...

@JoonasIlmavirta So you probably won't pursue a future in software engineering then? Lots of string manipulation going on there, and not a whole lot of sounds to go with it.

@Adam I've written a few little programmy things myself and I'm not opposed to it in small doses. For languages it's different. If nothing else, I want to be able to ask my teacher "What does this word esurire mean?" without having to spell out letters.

@JoonasIlmavirta Or sound ignorant trying to say it.

@Adam Quite so. I think any community working with a language must have a way to pronounce it.