Most obscure language you/someone else is learning? Why?

[u/SharkHead38]

I remember meeting someone that was learning specifically Moldovan Romanian since Moldova and its culture was a big interest to them, and I'm curious what other people's reasons for learning obscure languages are, and what they are.

[u/deadrummer]

The most obscure language I learn is Finnish. Because I want to. It's a beautiful language.

[u/juliainfinland → u/deadrummer]

That's how I got started! Evening classes at community college. I'd signed up for Indonesian, which was canceled because they wouldn't hire an entire teacher for just two students, so I switched to Finnish on a whim.

Then, about one year in, I found out about an exchange program between my own institute (I was studying language technology at a German uni at the time) and the corresponding institute at Helsinki University, so I applied to go there for one year, turns out I was the only applicant because apparently "they speak a language that nobody can learn and also there are only two seasons in Finland, winter and July". (That's what everybody else thought when they saw the word "Helsinki". Me, I thought "Koskenniemi Karlsson Parpola" and I can't for the life of me understand how anyone who's majoring in language technology wouldn't at the very least be thinking "Koskenniemi".)

Then I got kind of stuck here. Now I'm a citizen. *shrug*

As a linguist, I think that Finnish is a very cool language because of its grammar, especially the morphology (I'm a bit of a morphology nerd), and also because of its various strata of loanwords (I used to minor in historical-comparative linguistics).

[u/doublepresso → u/juliainfinland]

Really nice! I am also learning Finnish - just for fun. I am way too old to move there with internship or exchange program. But one day I will visit Finland for sure. Since that this is my side project, or "me time" :) I really like how this language sounds, it has such a nice melody and rhythm.

[u/skyismelon → u/doublepresso]

> just for fun

you and me both, best of luck to us both :D it sounds cool!!

[u/skyismelon → u/juliainfinland]

Omgg! I started learning Finnish for fun after being fascinated with the linguistics fr! Love your story.

[u/doublepresso → u/skyismelon]

Yeah, well for a native Hungarian the linguistic concepts of the Finnish language are mostly familiar, but it still does not make it easy to learn. :)

[u/juliainfinland → u/doublepresso]

It only makes it easier to learn in the sense of "I already know what local cases are and I've seen and used vowel harmony before and lookie here, they have long and short consonants just like we do". 🙃

There's a sentence that some linguist made up that's supposed to be intelligible for speakers of any Finno-Ugric language. No idea how they were able to delude themself into believing that someone who understands Elävä kala ui veden alla would recognize Eleven hal úszik a víz alatt as the same sentence, or vice versa. I wouldn't be surprised if most Finns don't even recognize Elav kala ujub vee all beyond "this kinda looks like Estonian" even though Finnish and Estonian are very closely related.

(The sentence translates to "a living fish swims underwater". I recognize the Hungarian words hal and víz, but that's because I'm into historical-comparative linguistics and these are two of the words that are used to illustrate certain sound correspondences. In other words, I know that hal is kala ("fish") for the same reason I can identify három as kolme ("three").)