|
Estonian ( ) is the official language of Estonia, spoken natively by about 1.1 million people in Estonia and tens of thousands in various migrant communities. It belongs to the Finnic branch of the Uralic language family. One distinctive feature that has caused a great amount of interest among linguists is what is traditionally seen as three degrees of phonemic length: short, long, and "overlong", such that , and are distinct. In actuality, the distinction is not purely in the phonemic length, and the underlying phonological mechanism is still disputed. ==Classification== Estonian belongs to the Finnic branch of the Uralic languages, along with Finnish, Karelian, and other nearby languages. The Uralic languages do not belong to the Indo-European languages. Estonian is distantly related to Hungarian and to the Sami languages. Estonian has been influenced by Swedish, German (initially Middle Low German, which was the lingua franca of the Hanseatic League and spoken natively in the territories of what is today known as Estonia by a sizeable burgher community of Baltic Germans, later Estonian was also influenced by standard German), and Russian, though it is not related to them genetically. Like Finnish and Hungarian, Estonian is a somewhat agglutinative language, but unlike them, it has lost vowel harmony, the front vowels occurring exclusively on the first or stressed syllable, although in older texts the vowel harmony can still be recognized. Furthermore, the apocope of word-final sounds is extensive and has contributed to a shift from a purely agglutinative to a fusional language. The basic word order is subject–verb–object. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Estonian language」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
|