Yesterday I arrived in the Netherlands. Until a few weeks ago, I thought that the Netherlands was home to the most fun looking written language in Europe. The long strings of double vowels in Dutch frequently make me smile.
After last week at Debconf5 in Helsinki, I’m ready to change my mind. Finnish has everything Dutch has and more.
I mentioned to Mika that I would be going out to dinner at a restaurant called Töölönranta. She mentioned that she thought the name was very cute because of all of the "eyes." I suggested that the might in fact be umlauts or separate umlautesque graphemes (as the case seems to be) but she remained confident that they were, in fact, eyes.
Linguistics aside, I think she’s right. Finnish wins.
She’s wrong
Well, it takes us (the Dutch) some time to learn kids where to put the eyes on “ideeën” (ideas) for example.
Dutch is a feeëriek (feeric) language.
Älä lyö ääliö, ööliä läikkyy (don’t hit me you fool, you’ll spill the beer)
eyes aka diaeresis or dieresis
Finnish was the phonetical base for Tolkien’s elvish Quenya language. You can see why…..Even Bergie’s example sounds cool…..