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Comment by hpaavola | Hacker News Reader

Finn here. There are countless memes about oddities of our language. The one I like the most is "kuusi palaa". It can mean;

   the spruce is on fire
   the spruce returns
   the number six is on fire
   the number six returns
   six of them are on fire
   six of them return
   your moon is on fire
   your moon returns
   six pieces

Good luck for all implementing NLP :)

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I like the "dog example" too, which highlights the different forms/cases:

https://linustechtips.com/main/topic/72936-english-swedish-g...

I'm a recent immigrant to Finland, and while the regular grammar makes some things simple, the cases and suffixes are enough to drive me crazy! The simple things are easy to handle if you're reading a textbook, but remembering them in real-time when speaking is very hard.

No wonder Tolkien used it as a basis for Elvish.

This is a specificially constructed corner case, not a general finnish thing:

- kuu = moon

- kuusi = spruce

- palaa = returns

- pala = piece

From those you can see how one can intrepent the compound word (with or without suffix) however you wish.

Eg:

- kuu+si = your moon (where 'si' is the suffix which means 'your')

- pala+a = pieces (where 'a' suffix is the plural)

also:

- kuusi = six

- palaa = burning

I wonder what oddities lie in Linus Torvalds' "perkeleen vittupää" (https://lkml.org/lkml/2013/7/13/132).

I'm afraid it very unambiguously just means fucking cunts.

In singular genetive and nominative cases no less, so, absolutely no grammatical fancy going on there.

Its literal translation is.

Satan's cunt-head

> "kuusi palaa"

Can we get a bit more detail here? Are those variations on pronunciation? How does a native Finn able to infer the correct meaning?

No, there is no variation on pronunciation. They sound exactly the same when spoken.

The only way to infer what's meant is from context.

My favourite homophone example is a 92 character poem in Chinese[0], where every syllable is a slight variation on Shi.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lion-Eating_Poet_in_the_Stone_...

Interestingly when I showed the actual text to my wife, who is Chinese, she didn't understand what was funny about it until I asked her to read it to me, when she burst out laughing. That's when I found out she doesn't sub-vocalise, where I do all the time.

These aren't really homophones though, right? Because they differ in tone?

There are only 4 different tones, so by the pigeonhole principle there must be lots of homophones.

On the other hand, most of the characters used to be pronounced differently when they were still commonly used as individual words, so the poem only works because it mixes modern pronunciation with classical grammar.

Finnish is pronounced extremely regularly. The way it's written is the way it's pronounced (in almost all cases).

Or counting in Finnish :D

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AuNs1v_jtfs

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