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this post was submitted on 05 Aug 2024
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I'm a big fan of language being as useful for communication as possible for people, which means it has to evolve with the times. While it's cool that Icelanders can still read 1000 year old documents, the fact that the language was artificially forced to stay the same doesn't sit well with me. They can get away with it because it's a niche language of only around 330,000 speakers, but no world language would ever survive under those kind of constraints.
As a native speaker of a relatively small language (under 6 million speakers) in a very niche language family, I understand eg. Iceland's desire to "preserve" the language – languages are by definition communication tools, but they're also inextricably tied to the culture(s) that produced them (and vice versa), so while I absolutely do agree that fighting change is relatively pointless, I think it's understandable that speakers of minority languages try to protect them.
So yeah, even though I definitely am a descriptivist and know that linguistic evolution is just a fact of life, I just can't help being a bit sad about it at the same time when it comes to Finnish. Not that I'd want to somehow "freeze" it since that'd be silly and impossible, but at the same time I'd love to see eg. promotion of some of the features that are currently dying out (whatever the hell that'd mean in practice). The primacy of English in this age of global mass media has minority languages in a real bind.
A language being closely tied to your identity is something I've never really experienced since my native language, English, is so widespread. I definitely agree that preservation of language is important - it doesn't have to be keeping the language the same, but can also just be keeping track of the changes. I've always been fascinated by the etymology of words, and English's word origins are very well-documented. I always assumed that it was the same in other languages that aren't in danger of dying out - are you able look up a random Finnish word online to see where it came from?
English is enough of a universal language nowadays that it's understandable that it might not be immediately obvious how language and culture / identity can be linked. Any sort of written, spoken, etc. cultural artifact is tied to a language, and while translation is absolutely a thing (duh), you do lose nuance even when translating to a closely related language.
With Finnish it's not really the vocabulary I'd like to see preserved, but grammar. English grammar is relatively lightweight even compared to most Indo-European languages, and Finnish and Uralic languages in general are on the other end of that spectrum. There's a lot of cool grammatical features, which, while not super duper necessary, add a lot of nuance that can take multiple words or even nearly a full sentence to replace. Where English and most other Indo-European languages usually need a completely new word to express new concepts, we can often just express the same thing by using our frankly ridiculously complex grammar (for a non-native learner!).
As an example, let's take the verb for "to look", katsoa. If you were to use a verb aspect called the momentane – which indicates that something was sudden and short-lived – to form the verb katsahtaa, you'd have something that's close to the English word "glance". Then you could use eg. the frequentative aspect – which (quoting Wikipedia here) expresses "repetitive action, but may also represent leisurely and/or prolonged activity, or activity that is not done in a particularly determined attempt to reach a goal" – to give you katsahdella and you'd have a verb that translates to something approximately like "to glance around aimlessly".
This sort of grammatical minutia has been getting rarer for centuries now, but the speed has definitely accelerated over the past ~40 years mainly due to more. In many ways it's unavoidable, but I still think it's a bit sad.
Oh and to answer your question about word origins, there's a free online Finnish etymological dictionary, and eg. Wiktionary has an etymology section.