Estonian Linguistic Humour

This post is about the language jokes that come from playing around with the Estonian language.

First off, the way to ask the time in Estonian is: Mis kell on? which literally translates into English as: 'What is a clock?'. Now if your interlocuteur is feeling cheeky they can come back with: Kell on ajanäitaja - 'A clock is something that tells the time'.

Next, when someone wants to ask how someone is doing you can say: Kuidas käsi käib? - 'How goes the hand?' to which Eva's grandfather normally waves one hand in the air and says: Nii moodi! - 'like this!'

Finally, if you feel that something is not quite right you can ask someone: Mis lahti? - 'What's wrong?' which literally translates as 'What's open?' Eva normally replies as such: Mis kinni? - 'What's closed?'

So all these jokes that Estonians were playing on me when I was just a poor foreigner just trying their best to learn the language, especially when it wasn't my fault that the Estonian language was this way, were getting on me so one day when Eva's grandmother asked me if the mug beside me was dirty I replied: Noh, see on valge. - Well, it's white. She had asked: Kas see on must? which can also mean 'Is it black?' Of course I knew from the context of the situation what meaning she meant but it was my turn to get back at the Estonians! Revenge is a dish best served cold they say.

I will leave you with a phrase that Eva and I wrote on the notice-board in our room.

Sünnipäevanädalalõpupeopärastlõunaväsimus
birth.day.week.end.party.after.noon.tiredness
The tiredness one feels on the afternoon of the weekend birthday party.

What follows is an edit made on the 8th of May 2008 after reading the post on the Omniglot Blog.

I felt the need to do some explaining just incase it starts an urban myth about Estonians and their language. It has already spread here.

My girlfriend and I just made up the term for fun. It is grammatically correct but it isn't actually used.

You can see where I was getting with this compound with the blog post title "Estonian Linguistic Humour". For the most part I was just testing out my knowledge of the Estonian genitive case.

Estonians are not generally great fans of long compound words. To express the idea Estonians would be likely to say something like this:

Väsimus, mida keegi tunneb nädala lõpus peale pidu.

tiredness. what . one . feels . week . end . head . party
tiredness what (partitive) one feels week (genitive) end (inessive) head (allative) party.

Or in real English: The tiredness, that one feels on the weekend after the party.

Points:

Breaking the compund word ( Sünnipäevanädalalõpupeopärastlõunaväsimus ) up we get:

Sünnipäeva . nädalalõpu . peo . pärastlõuna . väsimus

and changing gentitives to nominatives we get:

sünd (birth) . päev (day) . nädal (week) . lõpp (end) . pidu (party) . pärast (after) . lõuna (noon/ lunch) . väsimus (tiredness)

For the record in case there in any confusion about the linguistic nature of Estonian. The language is not fully agglutinating. It has many elements of an inflected language.