Comments by "Mikko Rantalainen" (@MikkoRantalainen) on "Why doesn't English have genders? Well... it did!" video.

  1. Finnish is way more advanced here. Not only it doesn't have gender for nouns, it also doesn't distinguish between he vs she in 3rd person references. In Finnish, the 3rd person is referenced as "hän" and it can refer to any human being: man, woman, child, elder or baby. Finnish still has "se" meaning "it" which is used for all non-human references such as dogs, cats and bees. Finnish also doesn't have the concept of definite nor indefinite article which makes English harder to learn for Finns because it takes really long time to figure out any logical reason to use "a" or "the" for any reason. (As a Finn, I still think definite and indefinite articles are equally needless as silent letters.) As an another twist, Finnish doesn't have future tense either. It's expressed with alternative ways, such as "aion matkustaa huomenna junalla" which would be translated directly as "I have a plan to travel by train tomorrow" instead of "I'll travel by train tomorrow". All the above doesn't mean that Finnish is an easy language by any measure. When we have over 3000 different inflection forms for every verb thanks to ability to combine multiple suffixes in the base form of a verb, it'll be pretty hard to learn that when your own language has nothing similar. Thanks to inflection forms the word order is mostly stylistic choice. For example "aion matkustaa huomenna junalla" is same as (more poem-like style) "matkustaa junalla huomenna aion" or "huomenna aion matkustaa junalla" (which would put more emphasis that the travelling will be done tomorrow). As a general rule, word order is used to express emphasis and the most important thing is put in the front.
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