It does. I'd say it's a problem that fades over time (the more time you spend in the US/Canada/UK/any other English-speaking environment), but at first, I definitely mixed them up. I've also heard that native speakers of the English language consider Estonian to be a "soft" language, whatever that means. (We have lots of vowels: our vowel-consonant rate is 45:55.) While I agree that ESL speakers might not make a difference between accents, I wouldn't say it's a rule. I can tell a Southerner from a New Yorker and a Scotsman from an Irishman and I am very much a "foreigner" (for any of you). I do agree, though--if you watch a movie and read all that criticism about the accents they didn't get right, we tend not to care that much. Most movies are subtitled anyway (even though my generation doesn't really care for/need subtitles). I suggest you write the character however he wants to be written. Languages, however--that's another story. Your character, like any "random" Estonian, will have learned English from the age of ~10 (3rd grade), Russian from the age of ~13 (6th grade) and German from the age of ~16 (10th grade). Most of the Russian language goes down the drain because my generation doesn't practice it for historical reasons/on principle/hates it at school. (Which is not to say we can't immediately tell when Russian is being spoken with an English accent.) But again, you can have him speak fluent Russian if you want to. (Both of my parents speak four languages and my brothers speak three. Coming from a country as tiny as ours, learning other cultures and languages is what you do.) In fact, speaking three languages fluently at the age of ~25 is not even remotely impressive here. I agree with what was said about Eastern Europe, for the most part. But Estonia is Eastern only historically. Geographically, we're Northern, and the majority of young Estonians will say so. (If you picked the southernmost points of all countries, Estonia would be the fourth northernmost country in the world. See here: #194.) We are neither ethnically nor linguistically related to Latvia and Lithuania; climate/proximity and history is what binds us. I've worked in Canada as well as the US, and I can say--most people haven't got a clue about what Estonia is. None. Quite a few people can't tell the difference between Balkan and Baltic, which is funny for me, and if people do think they know where it is, they think we're Russian. I did like it very much when people didn't have a clue, because then I was a "clean sheet" without any preconceived notions about who I was and where I was from and what kind of a human being I was supposed to be--in their eyes. Things you might want to know: Estonia is covered by WiFi. It's everywhere. Going to the US/Canada/UK/Germany is like going back in time for us because we are so used to having internet everywhere. I've never seen or used a fax machine in my life, nor do I know of anyone who has. We do not have paper checks. I am so young (23) I have never been to a polling station (we elect electronically). Religion is not important in Estonia, which is not to say we have a problem with religious people. It's just... not important. (PS: I just can't not mention--I, too, have written an outline and two chapters for a story (three years ago, I think) about an Estonian guy going to the US, but my approach was very different (it was a dark comedy), and I'm pretty sure I deleted it long ago. I felt too self-conscious writing about it, which is why I think it should be done by somebody else.) Hope this helps! Good luck! (PPS: Your fictional guy will have gone to the Army--or will have to have a health problem if he hasn't. Army is mandatory in Estonia.)
@Härmatis I just learned new things as well! For some reason Estonia does not have a particularly positive image over here . We're busy kissing Sweden's ass which has led to us constantly mooning at you guys. Anyway, I have two questions for you: 1) Why do our national anthems sound the same? I still haven't found an answer to this. 2) What does Finnish sound like to Estonian ears? To us you guys sound like you time-traveled here from the 1700s. Which is pretty awesome, actually.
@KaTrian : in the hungarian language all words are neutral and we use a single word for both he and she. Sex is determined by context or some kind of direct reference (like "the man"). When I speak in english I tend to keep this habit and include gender in the context. Fortunately I do not mix he and she as I've learned german for 8 years before english which gave me enough practice with grammatical gender (only "das Mädchen" drove me nuts) In addition the order of words in a hungarian sentence is not strictly determined by grammatical rules, and we use different word orders to slightly change the meaning of the sentence or express which part of the information is the most important one. This freedom is not limitless and for some word variations we feel that the sentence is unusual, unconfortable or simply "not hungarian enough". I'm aware that because of this I often break the rules of english sentence-structure. @Link the Writer : - I might be wrong but I have the feeling that americans use a lot of slang in their speech and mainly simple past, present and future tense while non-natives speak a more formal language and use all tenses (often wrongly) trying to blindly follow the grammatic rules they've learnt at a language school (and while they may speak correctly it could sound unusual) - Estonia uses the SI metric system (kilogramm, metre, litre, etc...) so your hero will have problems with US units. Miles, gallons and feets are usually no problem (inches are used worldwide for monitor and TV screen sizes) but ounce, cubic feet and US shoe sizes need some thinking and calculations. - Look up "international words" in an estonian dictionary. Some of these are similar but not the same in every language and I always get those wrong in english. If your character says telefon instead of phone or write televizion (with Z) it can add a foreign taste to him. (interestingly in Hungary we use the US form and say meter and liter. Why are there US forms anyway when you don't use these? ) - Look at some pictures from Estonia. Tallin is a perfect example of an Eastern-European city : it has a beautiful city centre back from the golden age (looks like a medieval town) and large concrete block buildings from the Soviet-era. Wherever you go in Eastern-Europe you will see this duality. - Estonia is in the upper half of the Eastern-European economies. Whatever is your assumtion about Eastern-European countries Estonia is not a poor one.
Terve, @KaTrian! Say hello to our construction workers and cleaning ladies for me, please. (I just couldn't resist.) 1) I don't know if what I know is more than what you know (what a sentence, aye?), but the melody (as you know), was created by Fredrik Pacius in 1848 (rumour has it he wrote it in fifteen minutes) for J. L. Runeberg's poem "Meie maa" ("Maamme"), which developed into a national song for the Finns. The Estonian words were written by J. V. Jannsen in 1869, just in time for our first Song Festival. In 1884, when our national flag was being inaugurated/blessed, that was the only patriotic song they sung. It became popular and loved among your university students as well as ours, and when both Estonia and Finland declared independence after World War I, both chose the "same" song with different words and different tempo. In essence, it's been your song for longer, but our anthem for longer. (We just weren't allowed to sing our anthem--just like any other patriotic song--for fifty years, not unless you wanted to get sent to slave labour camps in Siberia.) I know that the Finns--just like the Estonians--occasionally talk about choosing a different anthem (for you, the likely choice would be Finlandia, is that it?), but it seems that for now we have to learn to live with this. I wouldn't mind having a different anthem, to be honest, but the thing is, nobody agrees as to what it should be. 2) Honestly? Funny. It sounds funny. It's hard to describe--there's lots of ä's at the end of words, and it's like you aren't sure whether to finish a word or not, so you add ää. (I'm saying this with humour and respect.) I can understand why we'd have an old sound to you--we both came from the Ural Mountains, you just "kept going". Elämä on laiffi, eh?
Lol, I will... I'm not even saying this tongue in cheek, but we are assholes. Mystery solved! Thank you I knew about Pacius and Runeberg. They were finlandssvenskar anyway, so afaic you can have it and we can change the song to 'Finlandia.' Haha, that's cool. Estonian just sounds adorable as so many words have become obsolete or are very archaic in Finnish, but then you hear Estonian teenagers use them We love finishing words in double-vowels. Hence even laiffi becomes laiffii in the sentence you used. It's the colloquial partitive. Okay, I honestly don't mean to derail this thread, so I'll pretend for a second this is relevant to the OP, but I have one more question : Are the spoken and written Estonian drastically different? This is the case with Finnish, and I always feel so pampered when dealing with English and Swedish as the differences aren't nearly as drastic. (I'm a language geek, can't you tell?)
Haha! Last summer, my mother's life-long friends from Finland came to visit us, and they--the Finns--started going on and on about how angry they were that the Russians are buying all their land, and (at first) my mother didn't have the heart to tell them that it's the same in Estonia--except our land is being bought by the Finns. So when she finally told them, my mom and her Finnish friends agreed that all land should belong to its own people. Estonians aren't even worried about the alcohol statistics anymore because Finnish people take our alcohol. So, how's your liver? It's okay, @Link the Writer should consider everything I say research. (It's a separate question altogether whether he actually does.) I love discussing my language and culture, so it's perfect! No worries. Spoken and written Estonian are not different at all. At all. One of my older brothers and I were just discussing this the other day: we'd like palatalization to be visible in writing, and the third phonemic length ("overlong") should have its own sign, too, because we have too many headlines in the newspaper that could be interpreted several ways. Also, did you know that Skype was invented by Estonians? (We swear on it on the gods we don't believe in.)
It seems to me that it's mostly 14-25 and 35-65yo Finns who drink the most. Don't take my word for it, I have no statistics, but I've just noticed quite a few of our 25-35yo friends have kinda toned it down. The same applies to @KaTrian and I: we used to drink quite a bit and get well hammered at least once a week, but I guess some sort of oversaturation happened and nowadays we don't really drink at all anymore. A decade ago I never would've believed it was even possible to grow bored with drinking/being drunk. I always feel kinda bad when I'm helping a couple of Russians learn Finnish 'cause they have a really hard time differentiating between written and spoken Finnish since they are so different. The words are pronounced like they're written, but it's like when Finns talk, they all speak slang in comparison to written Finnish. If you spoke Finnish like it's written, you'd sound very weird to natives (they'd probably think you had some serious mental problems) and if you wrote Finnish like you spoke it, your readers would find it incredibly annoying and pretentious. I'm lucky the difference between spoken and written Russian isn't quite that drastic. I didn't know that, but way back when Nokia phones were still common on an international level, a lot of folks thought it was a Japanese company. Two 20-something guys didn't believe my grandmother when she tried to convince them that Nokia is (was) Finnish. For the OP: One thing you might want to take into consideration is that since Estonian is pronounced as it's spelled, unless the character is a linguist (or some such), has grown up in the States or some such, he would likely have some trouble with pronunciation since English words are often pronounced differently from the actual spelling.
Don't worry, @T.Trian, I was only teasing. I have no interest to control anyone's alcohol intake. I remember that rumour! It only made us laugh, though. It went along the lines of: "Did you hear there are people who think Nokia is Japanese? Hahaha!"
I know and I wasn't thinking you were trying anything, all's cool I've just been confused by the relatively sudden aversion to drinking when for years I loved beer, whisky, vodka, wine etc. If anything, I'm a little pissed off I don't like drinking anymore. Oh well, back on-topic...
Hmm, do you mean spoken Estonian does not phonetically or ortographically differ from the written form? Does spoken Estonian get shortened at all? What I mean is this: You might say/spell in English But I don't know what I want to do. (OK in speech). But I dunno what I wanna do. You can see that it can be spelled a tad more phonetically, though it's not quite that correct. With Finnish the same sentence. Written: Mutta minä en tiedä mitä haluaisin tehdä. (Never in speech). Spoken: Mut mä en tiä mitä haluisin tehä. (Southern dialect) Because spoken Finnish is drastically so different, I actually can't imagine writing prose in Finnish, especially not dialogue. I couldn't make it sound natural because if I used truncated forms of words, it'd look pretentious and be difficult to follow. If I use the formal language, it's stiff and unnatural. Publushed authors are able to navigate somewhere in between,I suppose, but even their dialogue reads badly to me, so I don't really read novels in my native tongue, especially dialogue heavy novels. With English, even if you don't write phonetically (forget about it -> 'fuhgeddaboudit'), dialogue can still look natural to readers, and some people even recommend against showing e.g. accents through spelling deviations.
(Sorry for late reply, life caught up with me) Thank you all so much for the replies! More stuff for me to research. *adds it to notes* - I didn't realize Maurice/Paavo would have had to join the military. Would he be allowed to leave the military at some point, or would he technically be in the Estonian military despite being in the States in his late 20s? How does that work? - I was one of those people who assumed Nokia phones were of Japanese origins. I blame my stereotypical preconceptions that anything that looks like a Japanese word must therefore be Japanese. I also thought Skype was made by the Japanese. <long pause, looks around> Yeah, I'm just gonna go now before I say one more offensive thing about the Japanese. <walks away in shame> - Alcohol, hm? *hastily puts in a soothing bar in the city for him to frequent to play pool/go bowling/watch TV with the option of meal and beer on the side* - Language is a tricky thing for me, so I'm reading all this going, "How in the world am I going to pull this off so he sounds like an Estonian?" Granted he would have been in the States for about 10 years or so, so he would be able to speak English well enough, but wouldn't there be words he'd still have trouble with? Or words he'd pronounce a bit differently than the rest of the characters? The trouble here, I think, is that English is so natural for me that I don't see what is so difficult about it. - A few questions about Estonians regarding politics. In America, we seem to like to talk about politics day in and day out, almost as much as we like to talk about our sports. Do they talk about politics just as much, or is it more low-keyed? How does their voting system work? Again, thanks for the replies!
From what I've heard/read, it's similar to the Finnish system: Every man has to serve in the military for at least 6-12 months (6 is the minimum) depending on which branch of the military they join. Some of course stay in the military and become professional soldiers, but most don't. The service is optional for women and men can refuse to serve, but then they have to do "civilian service," which is 347 days in Finland, i.e. they have to work in some civilian capacity for the government, usually entry-level jobs (like library assistants, caretakers in schools etc). If they refuse armed and civilian service, they go to jail. There are also periodic refresher training "sessions" (for every 18-60yo male, 100 days for officers and NCOs, 75 for specialists, 40 days for regular infantry men) that you have to attend throughout your adult life until you turn 60. I'd assume the numbers are a bit different in the Estonian military, i.e. the ages and lengths of service may differ etc, but from what I've heard/read, the basic system is similar. I'm not sure how living abroad affects the refreshers, though (that is, if Estonians even have them...?).
I see. So in the basic sense, he'd have to go serve in either the military or civilian service for an extended length of time for up to a year at most. Assuming he chose to be a library assistant instead, would he have to go back for refresher training sessions periodically (again, like you said, assuming they have that.)
Actually, I explained that poorly: there's no refreshers for civilian service, at least here in Finland. It's just the 347 days and that's it whereas those who do go through armed service, have the refreshers.
Of late, there has been quite a tendency to translate Eastern European novellists into English. In order to get the cultural background right, I suggest you read some of them - I have particularly Czech authors in mind. Čapek, Kafka, Ota Pavel, Škvorecký might help you out. As regards the question of coming to America - a lot of institutions and universities are almost pushing students to enroll for a study stipendium overseas. The problem is European students are kind of wary of taking such step, mostly for the lack of university level English. But I bet my shoes that if you go into the trouble you'll find an Eastern-European student or exchange program particpant with a penchant for literature in the US.
