Can you understand Estonian? | #2

Estonian is the official language of Estonia and belongs to the Finno-Ugric branch of the Uralic language family. It is most closely related to Finnish and more distantly to Hungarian. Estonian features a rich vowel system, a unique three-degree system of negation, and an agglutinative grammar that employs 14 cases for nouns and adjectives. Estonian uses the Latin alphabet, which has been adapted to include additional letters, such as "õ," "ä," "ö," and "ü," to represent the distinctive vowel sounds of the language. Estonian spelling is largely phonemic, meaning that it closely represents the pronunciation of the language. Estonian vocabulary has been influenced by historical contacts with Germanic and Baltic languages. Estonian offers a fascinating insight into the linguistic diversity of the Finno-Ugric languages.

Mutual intelligibility within the Finno-Ugric language family is generally limited due to the significant linguistic differences between languages. We created those mini language challenges to give you a chance to see for yourself how much of Finnish you can understand based on your linguistic background. If you're a speaker of a Finno-Ugric language do volunteer in for the future videos so we can run more experiments like that.

🤗 Big thanks to Kristofer from Estonia for his contribution to the project!

🏋️‍♀️ Support my Work:
My name is Norbert Wierzbicki and I am the creator of @Ecolinguist channel. You can support my work by volunteering to participate in the future videos or donating to the project.

🎥Recommended videos:

🤗 Big hug for everyone reading my video descriptions! You rock! 🤓💪🏻

#languagechallenge #learnestonian #FinnoUgriclanguages #languages #learnfinnish

[Ecolinguist]

🤓Translation and additional info below:
↓
TRANSCRIPTION:
Mis see on?
See on sinine ja on meie peade kohal.
Selles võib näha pilvi, päikest, kuud ja tähti.
See ulatub maapinnast kõrgemale.
Sa võid näha linde ja lennukeid lendamas seal.
Kui öö saabub, siis muutub see pimedaks ja võib näha tähti.
See on taevas.

TRANSLATION:
What is this?
It is blue and is above our heads.
Clouds, the sun, the moon, and stars can be seen in it.
It reaches higher than the ground.
You can see birds and airplanes flying in it.
When night falls, it becomes dark and stars can be seen.
This is the sky.


🤗Big thanks to Kristofer from Estonia!

[crowcreep]

Damn, never knew how similar it was to Finnish, I’m Swedish but I’m hoping to learn Finnish fluently since my grammas native language is meänkeili and a lot of dementia patients return to their native language, so I wanna be able to communicate to her if she’d ever get dementia. Also knowing 3 languages fluently is such a flex.

[michaelstephanustranquillus]

This was really easy to understand. 😊 As a native Finnish speaker I got about 80-90% of what he said.

[ameccchu]

I'm finnish, don't know any Estonian, but I understood everything except "päikest"

[Tomatobird]

Got a my guess down on the second hint sentence and it ended up being correct. Being a Finn, understanding Estonian isn't too hard since both languages are very closely related and have lots of similar vocabulary.

[caljulix]

I guessed it correctly! Even though I only understood "see on sinine" and "kui öö sabub". I am German and I barely understand any Estonian, but I'm currently learking it and it's fun :)

[martelkapo]

The only Finnic language I've studied is Finnish, at a VERY basic level, so all I can understand is "mis see on?" because it's similar to "mikä se on?" 😅

Uralic languages are fascinating!

[JorgeGarcia-lwvc]

No. nothing. zilch. Awesome sounding language, though.

[UKLatviaBall]

I’m from Latvia, south of Estonia, and couldn’t really understand anything. Most likely due to us having our linguistic roots from East Baltic, deriving from Baltic, from the even larger PIE group of Balto-Slavic. Estonian however originates from Finno-Ugric, which derives from the Uralic/Finnic branch of languages, which is where it is in some way related to Hungarian, and that also comes from PIE, and I think people say that Uralic languages derive from Old Mongol dialects although not sure to be fair.

[qwertyzxcvbnmasd]

"meie peade kohal." was weird because it sounds like it sky would where our heads are and not above it

[Pikseliotso]

I'm finnish and Estonian is kinda like "I can almost understand it but then some strange word pops up"

[SpookyBC]

As a native English speaking person who is going to learn Estonian after Finnish and Russian this looks hard to learn but the Finnish language will definitely help with it

[george.b.]

Yup, understood it just fine! I've studied Finnish for a while and picked up some Estonian by osmosis.

[TheMaskedRubi]

Taevas!!! Ah, how great is being estonian!!

[PlayerDream]

When I said “See on taevas”, then He said that too. He’s my mind reader

[SiberiaXc]

I'm erzya and I understood only "tähti" and "võid"

[eerokinos]

This one is quite trivial for a native Finnish speaker. But I think one could also easily produce a "mission impossible".

[ЄвгенійМаксимівВикладачАнглійс]

Minä ymmärrän vähän, koska se muistuttaa suomen kieltä.

[KaisaRoose-lt]

I understand Estonian mis see on is what is that?

[RivalsGuywithAlife]

Where u from? U speak estonian so great;)