Au + ring + O- by international ancestors
I didn't plan to write this much about Finnish but this linguistic finding is too fascinating to be left outside topics in this blog.
Aurinko stands in Finnish for the Sun (and other suns, but the primary meaning of course was the Sun - since that was the only one our finno-ugric ancestors were aware of).
Kuu, by the way, stands for the Moon, and is in fact one of the only very short words in the Finnish language.
Unlike
maailma, the Finnish word for the world, Aurinko does not mean anything else than just sun. I mean, it does not consist of roots that would be obvious to point out. Maailma, in contrast, consists of maa = land and ilma = air, thus maa + ilma = maailma; land + air = the world (I wonder where finno-ancestors forgot the water!)
Aurinko does not open its secrets in Finnish - it is an international, civilized fossile with roots all the way in Latin, Mesopotamia and in the hypothetical language tree of Proto-Germanic vocabulary.
[Au] stands in chemical terminology for gold [lat. aurum = shining dawn].
rinko could be split apart to form ring and O (k generally changes to g in finnish genetive, eg. auringon = of the Sun/the sun's)
Ring in turn stands for round objectives, often golden ones (ring as a jewel). Its etymology lies possibly in Proto-Germanic word khrengaz --> Old Norse hringr --> German Ring etc.
O, in turn, is not only a letter but also a symbol: round, circle, and orbital. "O" also stands for many articles in various language, e.g. Portuguese o for the masculine definite article (equivalent of Spanish el), for exclamation "oh" as means of expressing surprise, admiration and fear.
These three meanings summed up together result in Aurinko - a golden, eternally shining round object in the sky that travels along a huge ring-formed orbital in our galaxy.
Alas! - maybe our ancestors were not just hunting bears and trading furs in the Ice Age. Perhaps they watched the sky now and then, enjoyed the dawns and sunsets and were as aware of gold and alchemie as their fellows, the pyramid-architects in the South.
Noble intentions
"--And then it had gone to the seminar, taken some notes and held a similar presentation to its own group next morning. It said that the group was very motivated and that I could join them, too. Maybe I will, since it is a very good teacher and its doctoral thesis on macroeconomics is one of the best ones in Finland."The lesson is: never translate from word to word, it might get too harsh and badly collide with the communicative culture of another language. I wanted to demonstrate how noble intentions sometimes completely crash with generally accepted customs, manners and formal etiquette. Some what I call
soft philosophy will now follow.
Some languages are very formal whereas others are quite free of classifications, polite forms and various tones of politeness. One could say that Swedish is a very unformal language, whereas Japanese is most probably one of the most polite ones. English lies somewhere in between with French, Spanish, German and Russian. I don't know about Suahili and, say, Thai, but I would be interested to find out.
Finnish used to be a fairly formal language with You and you, mister and miss, sir and GOOD morning. Today, it is mostly a rather unformal language with 'you' for everyone, people just like 'Tarja' (the first name of the Finnish president Tarja Halonen), the simple 'morning' or 'moi' and -- 'it'. But are we Finns more harsh or unpolite if our language lacks forms of politeness? I say no, and defend this argument with the concept of
noble intentions.
When I told a Dane that the Finnish word 'se' means 'it' and we use it in everyday discussions referring to almost everybody except maybe our president, he was shocked. To most people outside Finland, sentences such as "It[my boyfriend] is going to a concert tonight", "It [my boss] told me I would be working in Helsinki next year" - sound pretty harsh, don't they? The usage of 'It' is not even a watershed that would divide people according to their educational background: lawyers, teachers, students, politicians, everybody replaces the formal 'hän' [she AND he] with 'se=it'.
Actually, I realized some time ago that the formal "hän" for he and she might in fact be too 'foppish' nowadays. If I called my sister "hän" when talking about her to my best friends, they would certainly find it either contemptuous or funny. The only circumstances under which I would call her "hän" would be if I needed to talk about her with her teachers, employer or with the president! Sometimes you can also hear young mothers talking about their children by "hän" - but just two weeks ago I read in the local newspaper how one of the journalists complained about this "over-doting" word choice. Besides, 'hän' is phonetically a fairly unpractical word making it difficult to pronounce in very fast discussions; generally speaking, [h] requires a strong diaphragm unlike [s].
I am sure substituting "she/he" with "it" would not work in every language. Also, 'it' wouldn't be able to substitute both she and he in languages that have this division of genders. But the Finnish 'it' is a great example to defend my argument of noble intentions. Oh yes, 'it' indeed refers to both homo sapiens sapiens, lynx lynx and algae, but so far Finns haven't considered it as an insult of any kind. Why? -yes, because of good intentions.
Some time ago I got involved in a discussion about politeness in languages. When some Swedes told that they don't have a word for 'please' (in the context of "could you please open the window?"), some speakers of more 'conservative' languages were surprised. I am sure they were thinking how on Earth someone would manage to sound polite without please and other formalities. In reality, I think it is very easy to express respect, appreciation, politeness, gratitude and everything else with any vocabulary. And it is also very possible to express dislike, disgust,and to deplore,to insult and hurt BY using polite words with irony.
Noble intentions can be expressed even by saying "I want to drink a cup of coffee here" instead of "Could I please get a cup of coffee?". It is an essential part of humanity to have enough patience and understanding to understand that even a direct request like this - when politely articulated, with a smily face and humble tone - should be considered as a polite question with noble intentions.
Finns are often condemned for not remembering the correct central-european etiquette with 'You', please, thank you, and sorry. But languages vary in their capabilities to express politeness in words. Finnish relies more on tone, articulation, mien, body language and distantly related phrases that are understood to mean polite suggestions. Instead of asking "Would you like some coffee", most Finns would say "There is some coffee over here in case somebody wants to drink a cup or two".
And it is also usual to replace "Thank you for your invitation" with "Well, I haven't been to Tampere for a long time, great to get there again".
"In Rome, do as the Romans do" is a good piece of advice. Still, everybody knows that human beings have rather universal body language, at least more universal than language coding; so next time I come and say "It had bought a new skirt. It was red with stripes and checks and it said it loved it" - I just ask for peace and understanding! If you meet a foreigner who embarrases you by using rather direct, even harsh vocabulary, forgets/does not know how to be polite in your language, and makes you feel uncomfortable on the basis of her/his word choices, just look at her/him - forget about what he/she said (or didn't say) and read the face. Attitude, respect and sincerity lies between chin and forehead.
I've got a mango in my pocket
I know the point of this story but I'm not sure if I manage to create a systematic, interesting plot that leads there. The point of this story is to talk about translations in wrappings with the text "ingredients", but I'll start with a mango in my pocket.
I got tired of apples and pears so I went on to buy a mango. Since I don't have a driver's licence, I'm usually dependent on a nice bag where I can put my things when I go cycling. This time I had not taken my usual bag with me so I needed to figure out something. I finally decided to stick the mango to one of the pockets of my jacket, and I was happy with that.
This incident just made me slightly sad: imagine if I had taken a huge plastic bag for a single mango (there are no small plastic bags available in the major supermarkets around here); that would have been enormous waste of natural resources. This thought, horrifying on its own, led me to the next one: packages and other wrappings have expanded so much recently. You buy a yoghurt in a beautiful tetra, and soups ready to be thrown to the microwave with a plastic plate. And it seems like the trend is moving towards even more plastic. That's non-organic stuff, which is really bad.
From the scenes of huge packages around cookies, carrot soup and even bread, my thoughts then finally shifted towards the linguistic perspectives of package materials. In fact, the diversity of languages might be one (big or small) reason for even greater amount of wrapping. Look at any chocolate bar and you see text all over the paper. Bien sûr, the primary function is to protect and conserve the product from heat, sunshine, dirt and bacteria, but the paper also needs to give information to consumers on ingredients. Sometimes not only on ingredients, but also on competitions, consumer service et cetera. Text is important, and the bigger the print the more attractive the product. The fact that our world does not speak one language only might be a partial reason for all that waste. Rubbish indeed.
Some linguistic relatives have managed to co-operate across borders and have created wonderful art pieces of flash language coding. If you ever visit any Scandinavian (or more precisely, Fenno-Scandian) country, have a look at some tooth paste tubes. You'll see something like SE/N/DK, followed by "Ingredienser". And the rest, oh well, you cannot really be sure whether it's Swedish, Norwegian or Danish. It's all mixed! Flashes everywhere, all the way through the text.
This one is from a tube of Colgate toothpaste:
Barn/Børn under 6 år enbart/kun använda/bruke en mängd tandkräm motsvarende til storleken/størrelsen på en ärta/ært. For att undvika/modvirke at tandkrämen/tandpastaen sväljs/sluges bør en vuxen/voksen deltage ved tandborstningen.
Hmmm... I know that texts on any package of daily products are not the most error-free examples of any language. But still, what's the point of this mingle? Now this text that basically gives a piece of advice concerning children using tooth paste, is a total mix of irregularities. Who has chosen which words are too different in Danish and Swedish to be understood in one of these languages only? Why does the text provide two words for "child" (barn and børn), whereas it assumes that every Swede would realize that 'for' actually means 'för' (for in English), not the past tense of fara, to drive (fara, far, for, farit). Or that 'ved' actually means 'vid'.
I assume this question relates to the study of making connections in brain - linguistic-neurological research. Ftr ll, hmn brn s sch wndrfl sstm tht mst ppl r bl t rd ths txt wth n prblm vn thgh 'm nt sng n vwls. So get rid of the flashes in packages, save space, plastic, print and money - and trust the people. Anyone who can brush their teeth knows that voksen is vuxen. Before that happens, I would however like to thank those companies that have at least started with the flashes. That's far better than patriotically disposed, separate texts in pure Swedish, Danish and Norwegian. Tack så mycket. Mange tak. Tusen takk.
Finno-ugric fellows
Just imagine the following: A Spaniard and a Swede are waiting for a bus somewhere in the deep forests of Sumatra. When the bus finally gets in, the Spaniard, who first steps onto the bus, notices the word "Sverige" (Sweden in Swedish) printed on the T-shirt of the Swede. Keeping in mind that these two travelers both find themselves travelling in the middle of nowhere, far from the European milieu and social and cultural atmosphere, what would you think these two backpackers are going to talk about in the bus?
Now imagine the following: A Finn and a Hungarian are waiting for a bus in similar circumstances somewhere in the exotic jungle of Sumatra. When they step onto the bus, what do you think they will start to talk about, assuming that they know each others' nationality?
The Spaniard (whose native language is Spanish) and the Swede (who at home speaks Swedish) are both members of the great Indo-European language group. They have linguistic relatives in Norway, Denmark, Germany, Australia, Belgium, Greece, France, Portugal, Bulgaria, Russia, Croatia and in many other countries all over the world (excluding natives of Vietnamese, Japanese, Arabic, Estonian, Suahili etc). But they most probably won't talk about their "common linguistic ancestors" in the bus, though. That's what the Finn and the Hungarian are possibly going to do.
It is funny how eagerly speakers of finno-ugric languages actually chase similar words. When I meet some Hungarians, we are very likely to start our small talk by saying a couple of diplomatic ice breakers, such as "käsi" (hand), and "puu" (tree). Almost every Hungarian knows that these words sound very similar in their language. For those who don't know about the bonds between Finnish and Hungarian, I can assure you: Finnish and Hungarian are in terms of vocabulary and grammar probably as close as Danish and Bulgarian! Still, what drives us, VERY distant relatives, to observe the similarities, to hunt for any possible proof of language affinity?
Wouldn't it sound strange if an average American (who speaks English, an Indo-European language, but is not particularly interested in languages) would start his/her first conversations with a Slovenian colleague by saying: "
I find the bonds between our languages so fascinating. How do you say 'international' in Slovenian? What about 'baby', or 'mother'?" -- and would then reply: "
oh, your word for mother - 'mater' - sounds exactly like ours!! Let's make a list of similar words in our languages!" Or imagine a Frenchman talking to a Portuguese fisherman:
"Wow, thousands of years ago our common language-ancestors went on fishing together, and thus your "peixe" sounds ALMOST like our "poisson"!" Does this happen in the real world? Maybe it does, but I have my doubts.
Hungary, Finland and Estonia are the only finno-ugric nations in Europe. There are of course many more finno-ugric languages than these three, but most of them are spoken by small minorities in Russia (Siberia), northern Norway and Sweden. So it might be natural that we are searching for even distant relatives somewhere out there in the diverse world of languages. Good or bad, but it sometimes feels like going back thousands of years to the Ice Age era and the hunters' world where words such as 'hand', 'fire' and 'axe' were essential.
If Finland was surrounded by finno-ugric countries only, I think we would have a very different type of menthality than we have now. After all, it makes a huge difference if you can (or cannot) understand your neighbour without even studying a word of their language at school. Perhaps we would then be like any other European nation and forget about the language brotherhood. Now that most people in Finland don't understand our eastern neighbour talking, and the western one is also a challenge for many, it is still an attractive option to try to find soul mates as far as in Hungary.
In reality, it is impossible for a Finn to even grasp the idea of what a Hungarian fellow talks about, but out of all the languages spoken in Europe, when Estonian does not count, it is the most familiar language with a similar intonation and tone, distantly reminding us of the common past sometime a long, long time ago. But still, isn't it worth giving a thought why Finns continuously call Hungarians their relatives, whereas this is not a very much used concept among Indo-European natives (except of course geographically close indo-european nations, such as Slovakia and Czech Republic).
Or would you not be surprised to hear the Dutch calling Lithuanians their
language relatives and linguistic brothers?
Der andere Inhalt
Ok, ich hab's versprochen: auf Deutsch werde ich jetzt einen Artikel schreiben. Irgendwie finde ich nur die englische Sprache viel lockerer, weil ich weiss, dass ein paar Fehler kein grösseres Problem sind - Englisch ist ja eine richtige Weltsprache und damit irgendwie gnädig geworden. Aber, los geht's - und zwar mit einem Wörterbuch!
Gestern Abend wäre ich beinahe vor lachen erstickt, als ich die tägliche Nachrichten gelesen habe. Ein politischer Artikel, der sonst ganz trocken und langweilig war, aber wegen eines komischen Zufalls, sah echt lustig aus.
"Humalalle eniten ääniä Perussa" habe ich gelesen. Zweimal. Dreimal. Nochmal. Warte mal!?!!
"Worum geht es eigentlich?" habe ich gedacht. So ein wahnsinniger Titel! Die Leser, die zufällig gestern einen Kater hatten, haben sicherlich gedacht, jetzt sei es das letzte Mal, als sie in der Sauna trinken wenn sie danach scheinbar nicht mehr lesen können...
Komische Zufälle sind in der Welt der Sprachen ganz häufig. Nachnamen, Städte, Länder und Regionen können viele Bedeutungen auf eine andere Sprache haben. Ankara auf Finnisch bedeutet strikt, und viele japanische Stadtnamen haben dank des Vokal-Konsonantenwechsels zahllose Bedeutungen in der finnischen Sprache. 'Aho' hat die Bedeutung 'dumm' in diesem Inselland im Ferne Osten, und ist zufällig der Nachname Finnlands ehemaligen Ministerpräsidents. Eine positive Überraschung war, als ich gehört habe, dass mein Name auf Arabisch "mein Traum" bedeutet.
Diesmal hat der Artikel aber dreimal echt Spass gemacht. "Humalalle eniten ääniä Perussa" - Humala kriegt die meisten Stimmen in Peru. Interessant wirklich, denn das Wort humala hat auf Finnisch eine doppel-Bedeutung: 1) der Hopfen 2)der Rausch, die Trunkenheit.
Wenn das die ganze Lust wäre, würde ich keinen Artikel über dieses Thema tippen. Aber das ist leider noch nicht alles. Peru und die Hauptstadt Lima bedeuten auch etwas auf Finnisch.
Zum Glück hiess der Artikel jedoch nicht "Humalalle eniten ääniä Limassa" (Meist Stimmen in Lima an Humala"). Irgendein Assoziation folgt sicher, 'lima' bedeutet nämlich auf diese finno-ugrische Sprache einfach Schleim.
Ist wirklich Schade, dass diese sprachwissenschaftliche Zufälle sich auf Peru beziehen. Mit Katzenjammer und Trunkenheit haben die Leser dieser Tageszeitung dennoch viel mehr persönlich zu tun als die Menschen in Peru, so "extreme" ist die Weinkultur im hohen Norden noch heute.
Hi school and spelling
I used to envy those American kids who could attend the spelling competitions. Such amazing opportunity to study etymology, words and build up vocabulary and even get some credit out of it! I don't think there are any similar competitions in Finland, not even anything related to words or their etymology. It would be ridiculous to spell words in Finnish, because the language is just so systematic. The only tricky word would most likely be "aggressiivinen" (=aggressive), since for some reason it is spelled with double g even though that is not necessary for correct pronunciation.
When the latest results of the international PISA study were published and Finland was (again) celebrating the top results, I still couln't swallow the explanations provided. There are no more than maybe five exceptions of spelling every student has to learn in the upper secondary school, and when I read some essays written by teenagers I currently teach as a substitute teacher, I must tell you that those papers were not exactly free of error. Finnish students check their writings by reading the text aloud, not by listing letters. And that is the problem with the very few exceptions that do not follow the way of pronunciation.
Put in short, I think some students (speaking certain languages, like Finnish) are better off in the PISA survey. They know that once they've learned a, e, i, o and u, and g, and j, they can use those letters according to their specific description.
To demonstrate how a language following systematic pronunciation works, I've translated the first passage into "Finglish" - in this context this means English spelled according to English pronunciation, written according to the Finnish spelling.
Ai juust tu envi tous Amerikan kids huu kuld ätend tö spelling kompetishöns. Sach ämeising oportjuniti tu stadi etimolotshi, wööds änd bild ap vokäbuläri änd iiven get sam kredit aut of it!
-- ok, that's all about this exotic mingle for today.
I'm planning to write about German next time... und echt auf Deutsch :)
Thin translations
Järjestellessämme tervetuliaisjuhlallisuuksia huomasimme epäkohdan talossammekin.
=As we were organizing the welcoming ceremony, we noticed a fault in our house, too.
Finnish words are looooong, and I've met some slightly frustrated people who cannot understand why we Finns haven't done anything about it. I thought it might be interesting to know that long words might actually mean short books. Read the points below to find out more.
A) I don't really know why the Finns write 'rautatieasema' instead of 'rauta tie asema'. In English, the equivalent is naturally 'railway station' (but why not 'rail way station' or 'railwaystation'?) It is true that there might be a greater amount of long words in Finnish, but those compounds - written in the Finnish way of adding all words together - makes most texts actually shorter. If you look at the example above, you can see that the spaces between the English words actually make the sentence slightly longer than the Finnish one. In a novel, this finally results in a great difference in length. Books translated into Finnish are in fact thinner -- but more packed.
B)
Metrotunnelissa oli talossanikin seinillä olevaa maalia.
(=In the metro tunnel, there was paint that I also had in the walls of my house)
In principle, there would be the possibility to make these long Finnish words look shorter by cutting them to smaller particles.
Metro tunneli ssa oli talo ssa ni kin seini llä olevaa maalia.
It's a bit weird to read that but it is still fully understandable. The English equivalent for the long Finnish sentences would be
'
Inthemetrotunnel, there was paint I had inthewallsofmyhouse'.(This of course is not entirely true - all kinds of endings in Finnish are in fact not independent words, but words in, on, under and of are)
I hadn't been using any Finnish for weeks when I started to read a scientific Finnish publication in the beginning of this year. It was a study book containing some biology, chemistry and physics. That was five months ago, and when I yesterday returned back to those pages, it was hilarious to see my own hand-written -- slashes everywhere! I had found it so hard to perceive some extremely long scientific names that I had split the words into their particles. When reading those pages full of "
yksi/fotoni/emissio/tomografia"-markings I couldn't help thinking how practical it might be to write it all separate.
r, r, r and r
My native language is Finnish, and people can still guess that when I speak foreign languages. Even though I've improved my pronunciation, I still make some obvious finno-ugric mistakes when I get tired and don't care too much about the correctness of consonant pronunciation.
In most indo-European languages, like German, English, Swedish, Portuguese, Russian (especially Russian!), there are lots of sibilants. In Finnish, we've got only one, the "simple" s (close to the s in the word some). Well, this has changed recently, partly because most people are quite good at foreign languages, and they do pronounce the word "shoppailla" (go shopping) as the sibilant sh in English. But at the same time, it is no problem for Finns to get the point of any phrase that originally includes s but has replaced that with another sibilant.
"Shateesha shaa juoshta vapaashti" (You can run in the rain freely) means exactly the same as "sateessa saa juosta vapaasti". The latter one is correct.
It seems like most languages in Europe don't allow such free usage of any sibilant. There is a clear difference between "shore" and "sore".
But how about the letter r? Even the English-speaking world has many variations of it. "Could you bring my car back?" said by an English person, an American, an Indian and a Frenchman sounds different, but it is still the same phrase. Everyone can understand it. In the German-speaking word, all the choice of the type of r you use tells about you is where you geographically come from.
For a long time I believed there would be no such language that combines different r-sounds. I found that thought rather surprising. There might be over seven different sibilants in one language, and only one type of r! Why have some languages taken the "art of playing with sibilants" to so extreme that my ear cannot even separate the sounds, whilst others survive well with one single s? (And this is again a very very narrow-minded perspective, I aknowledge) When I met a girl from Croatia I soon noticed it would take longer than a day until I would learn to separate all the sibilants she could pronounce so perfectly.
Three weeks ago I then finally found a language that in turn has variation in the r sounds - Portuguese! That was amazing news. And technically, I had to undergo some training before being able to pronounce a sentence containing both types of r without unnatural pauses. I found a really tricky one to practice, right from the map of Lisbon: Rua do Terreiro do Trigo. You should pronounce the r in Rua as the French do, the double r in Terreiro as the French do, the ro as the Italians do and Trigo as the Italians do. That's a real puzzle, but it serves as a great example of the art of mixing different r-sounds together.
If anyone knows a language that combines the soft American r, the Italian/Spanish r, the what we call in Finland "throat r" (the French one) and the Japanese one that sound like l and r together, please let me know!
Deutsch
I will write about languages, linguistics and slightly philosophical issues to this blog. I am aesthete also in terms of languages and so you won't find any technical charts of syntax here. I hope to write a lot about small observations from here and there - and introduce a word for every entry.
Bonn - the name of a city in Germany. Phonetically beautiful, soft, colourful. A linguistic trick is included in the brochures of the city: Bonnjour!
