A
Arved Sandstrom
Let me not even go into language arguments with a Finn. Not as anActually more often a less wrong way for Finnish would be to use
a for ä and o for ö.
Estonian. There have been orthography arguments just with Estonian until
not that long ago.
Speaking of orthography, it's funny that within such a small
Finno-Ugrian geographic space we have so many dialects (Estonian and
Finnish are still considered to be distant dialects). Just within the
boundaries of modern Estonia I can think of at least 3 or 4 dialects,
some of which are quite hard to understand to someone from another part
of Estonia. Not so long ago there were considerably more. Then you had
people like the Ingrians (Inkeri, Ingerlased) who had even more obscure
dialects.
My father for example was born in a part of Estonia that has a dialect
that is similar to a certain part of Finland. Well, similar in a way
that is discernible by linguists. He never had an easy time
understanding a bunch of folks a hundred miles away, and I don't mean
Russians.
AHS