Talk:The living fish swims in water

Implying source
specifying the source; "it is said" and other vague constructions imply that the source is unknown

Yes, but in this case it was conscious wording. It is often better to keep the main text as short as possible and leave out irrelevant information. The reader is unlikely to care which source it is, as long as he knows he can find it if need be. A better solution is probably to add a footnote and have the link in the footnote. However, I have never used footnotes in Wikipedia before. If you know how to do it, just go for it. Otherwise I can look around for the trick tomorrow. Mlewan 22:40, 1 July 2006 (UTC)
 * I tried to sort it out with footnotes, but I think that would be an ugly solution as well. Let's just keep it as it is. Mlewan 19:39, 2 July 2006 (UTC)

comparisons
The comparison of these sentences is interesting. For me, "Elävä" and "Eleven" sounds even like English "a living" or German "ein lebender", also a slight resemblance of "veden"/"viz" with "water"/"Wasser" might be there. This might however be coincidence. Perhaps some of the word-stems have been influenced by indo-european languages.

On the other hand "kala"/"hal" seems to be entirely different from "fish"/"Fisch". The words for "three"/"drei" are "kolme"/"harom" - here the same consonant change ("k" in Finnish, "h" in Hungarian).

There are lots of Hungarian native speakers who claim to observe an influence by the scythian language (iranic), which is believed to be indo-european. However, a generic relation seems to be doubtful.

--Olli M 23:58, 1 September 2006 (UTC)

The Hungarian one
The Hungarian phrase "Eleven hal úszik a víz alatt." is "Living fish swim under the water". Alatt means under, not in. 67.40.37.13 (talk) 22:16, 13 January 2008 (UTC)
 * I changed the first sentence to now read, "The living fish swims in water is the approximate English language translation ...". Is this qualifier sufficient to address your complaint? --M @ r ē ino 01:09, 14 January 2008 (UTC)
 * Even more so, eleven does not mean "living", but "lively" in English ;-) Szabi (talk) 23:00, 9 November 2008 (UTC)
 * BTW, "lively" is "eläväinen" in Finnish. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Lapasotka (talk • contribs) 10:56, 16 June 2010 (UTC)

Other languages
Is there any other variations in other finno-ugric languages? Like meänkieli, veps, karelian, vot etc... would be great if they could be placed here. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 87.227.76.244 (talk) 10:57, 1 April 2008 (UTC)

One detail
I note the Hungarian sentence has one word -- the article a -- without a corresponding cognate in the Finnish and Estonian sentences. This makes the comparison slightly less "perfect". —Preceding unsigned comment added by 83.81.244.110 (talk) 01:51, 3 June 2009 (UTC)

English translation
Why has the sentence been translated as "The living fish swims in water" when the Finnish, Estonian and Hungarian sentences themselves literally mean "The living fish swims under water"? Even if the former is better English, it is a pretty odd translation since it uses a whole different word. "The living fish swims in water" would be "Elävä kala ui vedessä" in Finnish.

In a linguistic article like this, shouldn't the English translation reflect the content of the sentences literally? -- ざくら 木 16:59, 9 September 2009 (UTC)