Skip to main content

200 words in Finnish

Writing 200 words in English feels like cheating. There are so many prepositions and articles and not that many compound words that 200 words (if you count all those) isn't that much.

In Finnish we cram all those little extra things in the base word itself and then we join the words themselves into a elongated compound word. While you can construct pretty long words with adding suffixes that, while technically correct, usually doesn't mean anything or are not usable in common language with compound words there isn't even a limit of how long they could be. On top of that we also have some pretty long base words as well, like järjestelmällistäminen (yes, that's just one word in it's basic form without any suffixes or anything). That's by the way the base word used to construct the longest word in the world.

In English that means systemization, pretty long word there too. We can add the epä prefix there as it still has an English counterpart un. From there it's getting hard to keep up in English. We go from unsystemzation into the lack of it with epäjärjestelmällistämättömyys. Being more specific that it's somebody's in particular lack of unsystemization we get epäjärjestelmällistämättömyydellään. How about making it into a question: "ones lack of unsystemization?". Sure epäjärjestelmällistämättömyydelläänkö?. That's already one to four ratio.

Of course not all our words are that long. But still, on average, counting by words in Finnish you need about 25-30 percent less words to say the same thing.