<pre>
Q: In any language, what word contains the same vowel repeated four times in a row?


S: There are many words in the Estonian language with the same four vowels
repeated.  You can construct even a grammatically correct
half-sentence, where all words share the same property. This
half-sentence is:

<pre>
      Seeeest ja"a"a"a"rsete kuuuurijate to"o"o"o" ...
</pre>

Seeeest: this means that you are comparing the following to something
(which must be indicated in the missing end of the sentence) and you
prefer (or consider more important) this ja"a"a"a"rsete kuuuurijate
to"o"o"o".

Ja"a"a"a"rsete: this indicates that the persons, mentioned in the next
word (kuuuurijad), are living, or at least are working at the place,
near the edge of the ice.

Kuuuurijate: this indicate that you are speaking about persons, who are
studying the Moon (let's say, some astronomers or such).

To"o"o"o": working at night - time when these astronomers work.

For example the full sentence:

Seeeest ja"a"a"a"rsete kuuuurijate to"o"o"o"d on ma"rksa ku"lmemad kui
lo~unapoolsetel kolleegidel

can be translated approximately as:

However, the working nights of explorers of the Moon, who are living near
the ice, are much colder than those of southern colleges.

From these examples you can also see that I have used these 4 words in
different places in slightly different form. It is also one of the
curiosities of the Estonian language. We do not have prepositions, but
we have 14 cases, so if in English, people put something in front of the
noun, we have to change the end of the word.

One more curiosity - in the Estonian language we do not have such tense as
future. We simply cannot say something like "I shall do it". We must
explicitly indicate, when, but this indication need not to be very
precise. So, a corresponding Estonian sentence would be something like
"I do it somtimes".

-- Urmas Haud (urmas@aai.ee)
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