montrith

Too internet

  • She/they

Petrodactyl spotter in exile


So I'm pretty sure at least some people know that the Finnish language does not have gendered pronouns and that we use "hän" for both he/she, but did you know that in spoken Finnish you actually don't even have to differentiate between animate and inanimate objects?

For example, let's say I'm telling my sister "Mom tried to call you earlier today". Now, the standard textbook reply to that would be something like "Mitä asiaa hänellä oli?/What did she want?", but in actuality the more commonly used spoken word response would be something like "Mitä asiaa sillä oli?/What did it want?".

The Finnish word for "it" is "se" in its basic form, but in spoken word it is generally accepted that "se" can refer to any type of third person singular nominative entity. Of course different slang forms of "hän", such as "hää", might also be used, but if you're actually planning on sounding natural when speaking to Finnish and not just in writing it's worth the effort to train yourself to use "se" in certain casual speaking situations.


You must log in to comment.

in reply to @montrith's post:

finnish is still v interesting to me. maybe in a couple years i'll give it another shot. (i tried learning when i was like 14 because i had a bunch of finnish internet friends, i never got much further than "minulla on koira ja kissa" though)