Talk:Finnish language

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Contents

[edit] Sweden-Finnish

I was thinking about adding something about how finnish youth speak finnish in Sweden. For an example you can hear: "Haru femmaa lainaa mulle?" = direct translation to swedish: Har du en femma att låna mig? = direct translation to finnish: Onko sinulla vitosta lainaa minulle? = english: do you have 5(kr) that I can loan?. Note that this is ONLY a spoken language, when we write we write formal finnish. The part that I find interesting here is how you use both finnish and swedish grammar and vocabulary. Haru: sv. Har du, note that the u is pronounced like the finnish u (swedish o). Femmaa: this isnt even a word, it's from swedish Femma (nick-name for 5kr coin) with an extra A to make it sound better. Lainaa: typical finnish. Mulle: from finnish Minulle, shorter informal version. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 85.224.47.7 (talk) 15:03, 13 January 2007 (UTC).

[edit] How the Finnish letters ä and ö differ from their Germanic (German, Swedish) counterparts:

In my opinion all "arguments" following this statement miss the point. I'll lay it out point per point:

* The Finnish sounds ä and ö, and their long counterparts ää and öö, are grammatically independent, often distinguishing unrelated words, e.g. talli "stables" vs. tälli "punch". German umlauts often correlate with distinctions of tense, mood, or plurality such as Rad/Räder for "wheel/wheels".

This is not a valid argument: While it is true that German ä, ö (and ü) often carry grammatical distinctions as in Rad/Räder, they do often enough occur "in their own right" in modern German, as eg in Mönch, "monk", or Tür, "door", not to forget all those words < Latin, Greek like Präsident, Ökologie, etc. Also, there are minimal pairs just like Finnish talli/tälli, eg in many cases similar to Rad/Räder, but where the umlaut is the only difference, as in Ofen/Öfen "stove(s)". But there are also minimal pairs which do not fall in the umlaut-as-grammatical-marker category, eg the unrelated words Tüte/Tute "[paper, plastic, etc.] bag"/"hooter" or Süchte/suchte "addictions"/imperfect of v. "search". On the other hand, the distribution of a/ä and o/ö in Finnish vowel harmony could be seen as an argument against the "grammatical independence" of ä, ö in Finnish...

* The pronunciation of ä and ö in Finnish does not change in diphtongs, or when followed by r, as it sometimes does in Swedish and German. The letters ä and e are not phonetically equivalent in Finnish.

This may be true (is it?), but how does it tell us anything about the status of the letters ä, ö? Eg, German regularly pronounces final d as t, but this doesn't mean that d isn't a letter in its own right in German, either. I guess it's just the coincidence of Finnish having a more regular ("surface") orthography than German and Swedish.

* The letter ä is very common, both on its own merits and for phonotactical reasons. Vowel harmony requires it for several grammatical endings such as the partitive case -ta/-tä, and it is also found in its long form, sometimes multiple times in a single word while contrasting with other forms, e.g. pää-äänenkannattaja "chief organ", tällä päivämäärällä "on this date"

Granted that ä is much more frequent in Finnish than in German. On the other hand, ö isn't; and ä is also curiously frequent in Swedish. And there's also long ä, ö in German and Swedish, it's just not marked by doubling the vowel letter in writing. For vowel harmony, see above.

* In German, umlauts are replaceable: ä may be written ae and ö as oe. This is not possible in Finnish, as ae and oe are vowel combinations of their own right, with very different pronunciations. Minimal pairs exist between ä/ö and ae/oe, e.g. hän "s/he" vs. haen "I seek". The custom of replacing umlauts with oe or ae can produce silly and unpronounceable results, for example in TV broadcasts of sporting events, when applied to Finnish names like Eduard Hämäläinen -> "Eduard Haemaelaeinen". The preferred method, if äs or ös are not available, is to use simple a or o as in Kimi Räikkönen -> "Kimi Raikkonen".

First, I'm sure there are ae/ä or oe/ö minimal pairs in German, but I can't think of one now. There should be very few of them, though, but this doesn't tell us much about ä, ö's status, it's just due to ae/oe being very rare combinations in German. Second, the different replacement strategies don't show a difference between Finnish vs. Germanic Swedish and German, but between Finnish, Swedish vs. German! Swedish replaces ä, ö > a, o just like Finnish.

* As in Swedish, the Finnish letters ä and ö are alphabetized as independent characters added to the end of the alphabet; the Finnish alphabet ends with "X Y Z Å Ä Ö". In German, the umlauted vowels are alphabetized together with their mother-characters, which is convenient given their grammatical role in German.

At least here it's explicitely said that it's not Finnish which is special in its treatment of ä, ö, but German which differs from Finnish and Swedish. That's nothing but admitting that the whole argument doesn't make much sense, isn't it?

Finnish does not use the visually similar diaeresis notation, as used in French and English words such as coördinate or naïve. In such situations either hyphen (when the vowels belong in different syllables) or double vowel (when the question is about long vowel) is used: koordinaatti, naiivi.

German doesn't use it much, either (the only word I can think of is the Aleute islands' name: Alëuten; but cf. German Koordinate, naiv) -- for an obvious reason, and probably the same reason as in Finnish: you couldn't tell the difference between a-umlaut and a-dieresis, thus diaereses wouldn't reduce but rather augment ambiguity. Also, the second sentence is very misleading: is oo in koordinaatti a long vowel? Because in English it's not. Or should it read ko-ordinaatti? Why is there no example for the hyphen?

The hyphen is used to disambiguate vowel sequences in compounds. When you compound "linja" and "auto" you get "linja-auto" (with two short a sounds and an optional glottal stop in between) whereas "*linjaauto" would be analyzed as a single word, or possibly "linjaa" + "*uto".
There is also the case of the apostrophe, where inflection or derivation causes a short vowel to follow a vowel of the same quality; this is rare, but there are a few textbook examples -- two that come to mind are "raa'an"(genitive of "raaka" where the stem "raa-" is suffixed with the genitive marker "vowel extension + n") and "liu'uttaa" (derivation from "liu-", from "liueta" 'to become dissolved', + "-[u]ttaa" roughly 'to cause'; to cause something to be dissolved, i.e. to dissolve something)
Feel free to try to work this into the article somehow ... era 14:31, 23 March 2007 (UTC)

If you've read through my broken English until this point, then you know what I think is the problem. Now decide what to do. My own proposal would be to just report the facts, ie name the existing differences like sorting order and grapheme replacement without spurious explanations, but dunno. Greetings, a visitor from Germany.

Thank you for interest in Finnish language. I suggest we trust experts on the points and questions you have raised.

[edit] Very long article

I must say, I'm very impressed by the amount of detail that's going into this article! But if you have to put a table of contents in the front, I think it's getting a bit too long for a single Wiki page... Not only is it difficult to navigate for someone looking for a particular bit of information (since we don't have links to anchors within pages on wiki, and there's some resistance to adding such a feature), but the page is now over 45k long, and textareas over 32k can't be reliably edited with several browsers (Internet Explorer 5.5 and Opera 5.1 on MacOS are known to have such problems).

What do you (who have been working on it) think of breaking it up into several sub-articles? ie, a general overview in Finnish language, then more specific pages; perhaps Finnish phonology, Finnish verb, Finnish noun, etc. Brion VIBBER

Seconded. As of April 25, 2002, Finnish language is #37 on The longest articles. I haven't been working on it, but I've been working on another long page (wikipedia:Bug reports), and splitting it up into subpages helped a great deal. I'd say split up most pages that grow above 16 KB. --Damian Yerrick

Awww, I was aiming for #20 :-) I'll put some thought into a sensible way to divide it up. Steve Day

OK, now there are Finnish language, Finnish language phonetics, Finnish language grammar and Finnish language spoken. The grammar article is still 26k, so I'll think later about sensible splits. Steve Day

[edit] Size of Swedish minority

The size of the Swedish majority is said to be 6% here and 5% on Finland. I think the correct one is 5% but I'm not sure. I remember seeing a number of 250 thousand somewhere.

[edit] Aletaan and Jatketaan

Pasting from the article:

  • Aletaan and Jatketaan (Eila Hämäläinen & Salli-Marja Bessonoff: ISBN ??) [tr. Let's begin and Let's continue]

These books are in Finnish. Together, these books and their associated exercise books form a fairly complete course in Finnish, roughly equivalent to the Finnish for Foreigners books. However, the production quality is not very nice - typewriter font throughout and poor layout. This book is not of so much use without a teacher.

(A native finn would like to note that those words are strictly in passive form and are bad finnish if used to mean "let's". Sadly the correct "Alkakaamme" & "Jatkakaamme" are such clumsy words that they are rarely used. The words "Aloitetaan" & "Jatketaan" (also means "is being extended") are in use in spoken language. "Aletaan" is used in structures like "let's get going", aletaan mennä.)

I thought this note would belong more on the Talk page, until someone comes to a conclusion certain enough to warrant just changing the first line of that. -- JohnOwens 21:50 Mar 22, 2003 (UTC)

This isn't bad Finnish as such; just colloquial. It is quite widespread for Finns to use the passive form instead of the first person plural conjugation (when following 'me') or imperative (standing alone) as in the title of this book. We should delete criticism of the books but leave in their positive aspects. [[User:HamYoyo|HamYoyo|Contact Me!]] 03:07, May 31, 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Book reviews: out of place

Why are there reviews of books here? Reviews are subjective, not objective. Look at any book on Amazon.com and you'll see a wide range of opinions. I favour deleting the opinions about the books ("not too intimidating...", "slow pace", etc.) and just leaving the titles. Wikipedia is built on NPOV. Crculver 17:56, 29 Apr 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Alphabet / orthography

Why has the Finnish alphabet been reverted to a separate article when it is so interlinked with the information on Finnish orthography which is still under Finnish language?--[[User:HamYoyo|HamYoyo (Talk)]] 20:30, May 31, 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Yleiskieli vs. kirjakieli

It is a common mistake in Finland to call spoken formal language yleiskieli as kirjakieli, which is actually written formal language . I corrected it in the article. -Hapsiainen 19:28, Oct 28, 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Vapaa - svobod

From: Ho Yan Chan: I was the one who said vapaa comes from Russian svobod, but you didn't believe me because you said I was a vandal.

[edit] Notes on the revert

(Not very clear which revert. Is this related to the "svobod" comment above? Apparently not. era 14:48, 23 March 2007 (UTC))
  1. "tietokone" is composed of tieto, a neologism coined from tietää "to know (the road)", which in turn comes from tie "road", and kone "machine". Tieto does not mean "data" in the strictly scientific sense, but very vaguely "knowledge", "info", "some data", "facts", "trivia", "lore", and so on. If it was strictly "data machine", it'd be akin to Swedish dator, e.g. datain.
  2. sähkö- as a suffix means "electrical-", even if its independent meaning is "electricity"; English does not use a suffix like "electricity-" for "electrical-".

Hello, the Finnish word "tieto" is in my opinion quite similar to the word methodos from, ancient greek, and I am pretty sure that it is indo-european in origin. Methodos means "trail", basically when something is done the same way many times, you get a trail to some place. This is then knoledge. The werb think is also a road metaphore "ajatella" (think) from "ajaa" (drive).

tp


[edit] Featured article?

I think it should be a featured article because there is much detail in it, and I just frankly think people need to know more about Finland! There haven't been that many featured articles about languages also. flockofpidgeons 23:52 11 Feb 2005 (UTC)


[edit] Finnish /l/ sound

I've never commented on a talk page before, so forgive me if I don't follow the protocol properly. I wanted to ask people who know the Finnish language about something. It has always seemed to me that the Finnish L sound is different than that of, say, English. It almost has a flaplike quality to it, as if the tongue tip flaps down to the lower teeth... it's hard for me to define exactly. But all the literature I have seen on Finnish transcribes it to IPA [l]. Does anyone know whether this is indeed a different sound?

P.S. I'll check back to this page but I should love it if you might write to me as well at ispollock@shaw.ca .

-Ian Pollock (posted at 11:34, 12 September 2005)

(G’day Ian. I’m afraid I can’t answer your question, but I’m just saying as a courtesy that I’ve reformatted your post a bit. Also, it's nice to add a date to your posts so that people can tell when they were made easier. You can do that either with four tildes as ~~~~, which'll include your IP—if you get a user account and log in, which is very simple and requires no personal data whatsoever, it shows your username instead—or as five tildes as ~~~~~, which is just the date. —Felix the Cassowary (ɑe hɪː jɐ) 07:14, 12 September 2005 (UTC))
...and mark replies with that colon sign (:), which ensures their correct intendation. But, for the question. In the Tampere dialect, there really is a flapped L, which is orthographically nil (kyllä → kyä). This would be an alveolar lateral flap. But, I think that in every language, an intervocalic short "L" is necessarily flapped, as the articulation is physically speaking a tap. This is not a strong enough phonological contrast to be even noted in IPA transcriptions, let alone to be phonemic. Furthermore, in IE languages, L is typically either palatalized or velarized, while the standard (Western) Finnish L has no such contrasts. (Eastern dialects do near-phonemically contrast this, after the *deletion of word-final 'i'. Or so it is easy to reconstruct.) --Vuo 21:21, 14 October 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Jalopeura

It is unlikely that Agricola invented this word. Jalopeura (= elk by the ancient Finns?) was probably originally the constellation Lion and later, after being used in horoscopes, became the synonym of lion. --Jyril 21:25, Mar 24, 2005 (UTC)

Another (more practical?) explanation is that in Agricola's abc book, each letter had an animal illustration. At that time I and H were adjacent letters (no J existed). H should have been illustrated by a Hirviö (=monster), i.e. the Lion, a totally unknown frightening animal. Letter I again should have been illustrated by Ialopeura (=elk). However, the letters H and I and their corresponding illustrations were mixed up in the print process. Well, as in the play "Keisarin uudet vaatteet", no one had the knowledge, courage or influence to dispute what the first book ever in Finnish presented as a fact. Hence the strange parallel name "Jalopeura" (=noble deer) for Lion in Finnish and the equally strange word Hirvi for our greatest and most valuable wild animal, the elk.

KL

[edit] Republic of Karelia

I don't think it is an official language of the Republic of Karelia. And if it is, the Karelia article needs editing. 63.227.64.224 15:21, 24 Apr 2005 (UTC)


[edit] Proposals to make the page better

The proposed expansion of the page is already more or less outlined in a commented-out section by the original editor. Some additional material should be included as an intro to the grammar, after the link to the main Finnish grammar article.

Besides expanding the current material, this page is one that needs, as it goes, tender loving attention. The section on orthography and the history of Finnish spelling is fascinating, but it does not really belong in a main language article; it should be merged/moved elsewhere, maybe to Finnish alphabet or Finnish orthography.

The amount of work on the part of the original editor is remarkable, but regrettably, s/he repeatedly confuses or mixes orthography with phonetics and phonology. At some points it is impossible to tell whether (1) a phoneme split into two different realizations in different dialects, or (2) spelling pronunciation caused a grapheme to be misread differently in two places, or (3) whatever. Not being a Finnish speaker, I can't correct it myself without risk of error.

--Pablo D. Flores 13:50, 30 Apr 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Adessive or illative?

See History, the last sentence before Agricola's work: 'maahan' and 'huoneeseen'. It was me who changed the case reference. L.S.

[edit] Translation of puhelin

The article currently states puhelin "telephone" (literally: "thing for speaking") while the literal translation is "I spoke", the first person past tense form of "puhella" ("to speak") - This follows the Finnish custom of creating device-words from the past tenses of verbs in the first person: For example "vastaanotin" from "vastaanottaa" (reciever or literally I recieved from to recieve) or "reititin" from "reitittää" (router or literally I routed from to route).

Technically speaking the translation is correct if you consider a telephone a thing for speaking (or router a thing for routing), but this is probably not the idea it's trying to convey.

Not really, the -in derivational clitic has a completely different role from a first person past tense. Equally you could claim that the English plural -es is exactly the same as the English third person -es; like, "goes" is "many go".
Plus, as far as I know, the clitic -in doesn't just mean "thing", it means "technological implement" or "machine which serves a purpose". The literal translation is not "a thing that speaks"; it's not even the verb puhua "speak" but its frequentative puhella "chatter". It's more like "an implement for conducting a talk". Cf. kirjoitin "printer" ("a machine which writes") vs. kirjuri "clerk" ("someone/-thing which does writing tasks"). --Vuo 20:40, 14 August 2005 (UTC)
Yes, it serves another role - and the literal translation is a 'thing that speaks'. Taking for example (picks a random verb) 'juoksuttaa' what would the word 'juoksutin' bring to mind? It's still literally a past tense form of the verb even though when used to describe a device it would indeed be a device for 'making people run'. However the latter interpretation would need the device to be either present or well known and wouldn't change the fact that it's formed from the past tense form.
Actually juoksutin means something, make a google search for "juustonjuoksutin" (rennet?). :) But anyway, I think Vuo is correct here. -- Jniemenmaa 15:16, August 14, 2005 (UTC)
It is just a coincidence that the first person past tense is sometimes similar to the name of the instrument derived with -in from the same verb stem. Cf. avata ’open’, avasin ’I opened', avain ’key'; (alle)viivata ’underline', (alle)viivasin ’I underlined’, viivain ’ruler’; tummentaa ’darken’, tummensin ’I darkened’, tummennin ’darkener’; kaataa ’pour out’, kaadoin or kaasin ’I poured out’, kaadin ’pitcher’; etc. --Hippophaë 22:41, 14 August 2005 (UTC)
My father has a jocular habit of calling keys avasin. — JIP | Talk 13:15, 29 September 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Savo

The following text was at the New article Savo made a redirect here: The Savo dialect is one of dialects in Finland, the others including eg. Middle Finnish dialect and city dialect of Southern Finland. Savo is generally regarded as a "redneck" manner of speaking.

[edit] 10, 100 or 1000 lists are not encyclopedic

I removed the following from the article, as it's more fit for some personal site rather than an encyclopedic article. I don't think it belongs here, and if it does, it needs to be reformatted. A list of language-specific words, maybe? Sisu, sauna, löyly, and possibly kapulakieli would qualify. The rest aren't difficult to translate, and toimertua or vanhurskas are not a everyday words at all.

  • sisu: the notion of relentless courage and tenacity and the ability to try and succeed even against impossible odds.
  • sauna: a hothouse used for bathing in high relative humidity and temperature
  • löyly: the effect of throwing water on the stones of kiuas (sauna oven) in sauna. Used both physical (temperature, relative humidity, time) and social sense.
  • kaiho: bittersweet existential feeling of involuntary solitude and separatedness, and longing for something unattainable or extremely difficult to attain, like being separated from your spouse behind an ocean. Almost the same as Portuguese saudade
  • kuura: ice condensed from air humidity on window glasses or other smooth surfaces in frost
  • toimertua: for a lazyman to quickly refresh and to get doing things
  • vanhurskas: a person recognized as permanently and unshakably pious and apparently destined to Heaven
  • itsellinen: a person who is either standing on his or her own feet and creating his or her own fortune, or a person who is left completely on his or her own luck
  • pönkittää: to reinforce or support a structure (either physical, social or societal) which is about to collapse if left on its own
  • kapulakieli: artificial, complicated and very formal language full of foreign loans and structures, and which is almost impossible for a layman to understand, and whose understanding produces difficulties even for professionals. Usually found on legal documents and technical manuals. Close to gobbledygook. Another word, pekoraali, coined by Kirsi Kunnas, refers to a pseudo-language which follows concisely the rules of grammar and ortography, but where the words are pure gibberish and have no meaning besides being just arrays of phonems. Sanahelinä refers to grammatically correct text with words of intelligible meaning, but where the sentences themselves carry no meaning (compare nonsense). A puppugeneraattori is a computer program programmed to produce sanahelinä.

--Vuo 13:02, 23 September 2005 (UTC)

This reads a little like Douglas Adams' marvellous book The Meaning of Liff :) The idea of a separate list is good, but I don't think it's a list of language-specific words we need - more accurately, it's a list of concepts for which single-word expressions exist in only one language Adambisset 01:55, 30 September 2005 (UTC)

Very good point. It's a pitfall of those who too readily want to talk about "untranslatable ideas" that what they're really talking about is the difficulty of taking all the range of meanings for a single term in source language (L1) and then finding a one-word translation for all these meanings in the target language (L2). Not surprisingly, this is often impossible to do. A well known example is the claim "There's no word/concept for 'privacy' in Language X." One often hears "Japanese [or some other language/culture] has no concept of privacy." But the problems with this reasoning are several.
  1. In English, the word "privacy" has a number of distinct meanings: shame, secrecy, protection of documents, solitude. Very often many of these individual meanings do have clear translations into the target language even if there isn't a term that by itself covers all of these English meanings.
  2. Words closely associated with "privacy" as derivatives or roots add even more distinct meanings: private (low rank in military), privation (suffering), privatize. Again, many of these concepts will have translations, although it's very unlikely that any single term in the target language will cover all these meanings.
  3. Japanese (or some other language) will have both concepts and words for many of the concepts covered by English |private|, even though there it won't be possible to find a one-word translation that covers all of the concepts represented by the English word.Interlingua 13:19, 30 May 2006 (UTC)

The untranslatability of meanings in languages is due to several reasons of course. One being that all words have unique networks of connotations, and hence it is impossible to bring all of those along, and a professional translator will chose perhaps another word if it fits the context better. There are certain verbal phrases for instance which cannot be literally translated, there are word games and common metaphors etc. Also, cultures grow in a natural environment, and hence, even if one could use the word "lago" to translate the idea of "järvi" to a Spanish speaking aymara at Titicaca, it would be questionable whether the aymara could ever actually imagine anything similar to "järvi", or anything similar to what another Finnish person would, as there is nothing similar, naturalisically speaking in the eco-environment there. The word "vanhurskas" apparently meant vanha & hurskas before it was rendered into what it is now by christianity.

tp

[edit] Deer stop

A friend tells me the Finns have a unit of distance (almost certainly archaic) equivalent to the distance a reindeer can travel before needing a 'comfort break'. Please tell me this is true, and tell me the word if you can. Adambisset 11:53, 29 September 2005 (UTC)

Poronkusema. Not in everyday or serious use and restricted (as are the reindeer) to rural Lapland. Googling tells me that it may not have an exact value. Plus the reindeer's pulling a sleigh. --Kizor 13:09, 29 September 2005 (UTC)

Wonderful! Thankyou Adambisset 01:47, 30 September 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Meänkieli and Karelian language

I removed the half-sentence and the classification of their dialects as separate languages is by many Finns perceived as instrumental to the oppression. This might be true for Karelian language in Russia, that I don't know. Regarding Meänkieli/Tornedalian Finnish in Sweden, however, this is rubbish. The term meänkieli was invented by language activists (in want for a better word) in the 1980s, not by the government or anything similar. The Finnish language had not been permitted in school not even during the breaks - in some places as late as in the 50s! - and "half-languagedness" (speaking two languages but neither of them very well) was a major concern. Finnish was seen as a problem, hindering the kids from learning Swedish. Today we know better!

If someone wants to put that half sentence back, I wonder who are the Finns who percieve this. Finns in Finland, in Russian Karelia or someplace else? / Habj 23:27, 1 October 2005 (UTC)

Oppression works in mysterious ways :-)
Personally, I think Meänkieli is a tool of oppression. The fact that the "oppressers" are meänkieli speakers themselves does not make a difference. If the Tornedal Finns were true Finnish speakers they could demand their full language rights, including higher education in their native language, most likely in Finnish universities.
By stating to be speakers of meänkieli, Tornedal people denouce their right to civilization in their own language and demount their Finnishness to a role only in the kitchen (Kyökkikieli).
The Fennoman movement of the 19th century made Finnish into a true language of civilization (sivistyskieli). (This is today expressed by the fact that the Finnish Wikipedia is one of the largest Wikipedias.) This puts the Finnish language in a position like few other languages. Not all languages are equal, in most cases the speakers of minority languages have no other choice but to adapt the majority language.
-- Petri Krohn 23:54, 3 October 2005 (UTC)


I will be pretty longwinded, forgive me! Maybe you already know all the things I will say but it is important for my reasoning so I say it anyway.
Your notice that the Tornedalian position of Finnish is somewhat "only in the kitchen"-related is correct. The linguists talk about the different "domains" of a language, different areas of life, work and official life that have their own vocabulary. Finnish in the Tornedalian area has lost most of these areas, that is very true - but Meänkieli is hardly to blame for this. Rather, it is a result of political decicions in late 19th century, to make the northern Finnish-speaking parts of Sweden Swedish-speaking.
The most important part of the "Swedisation" of the Tornedalian area must have been when the schools started teaching only in Swedish. This was a political decision taken in the 1880s. This is where the process started that pushed Finnish language in the Tornedalian area (used in the widest sense of the word, i.e. the originally Finnish-speaking parts of Norrbotten) away "to the kitchen". For generations, it has been spoken only in the homes and in informal situations. School teachers forbad the children to talk Finnish in school, even during the breaks, as late as in the 50s! and so the kids were taught in school that Finnish is something bad. During the 60s it was observed that the kids in the Tornedalian area had the worst school result in the whole country, and the Finnish language was blamed - not the lack of training in their first language, as linguists probably would assume. The Swedish word halvspråkighet, "half-languaged-ness", was invented to describe the situation in Tornedalen - a result of opression of the Finnish speakers, no doubt.
Different minority languages have different situations. In the US, there are people working on preserving different Indian languages that are disappearing and maybe only have a dozen of true speakers, those who has it as first language, left. Besides the lingustic part - the formulating of grammatical rules and collecting and writing down the vocabulary - there are language classes where people go to study the language of their ancestors, they publish children books for small children in this language etc. For these people there is no interest in bringing their language "out of the kitchen", nor is it realistic - it is all about pride and identity.
On the other side of the scale, we have Swedish language in Finland. Swedish in Finland is very much not in the kitchen, but can be used in all kinds of situations. The Swedish-speakers in Finland have a struggle also, that can be described from many aspects and you probably know a lot more on the subject than I do. One of the aspects is to maintain their language in all the domains, so there does not appear situations that they can be handled only in Finnish. This would mean that soon the Swedish vocabulary in this area would be lacking, and their language would not be complete.
The situation of the Finnish language in the Tornedalian area can be found somewhere inbetween these two extremes. In one sense they haven't been true Finnish speakers for a long time - at least for most of them, their language covers only parts of the aspects of life. I am sure there are Tornedalian people of many shades, who have very different status on their Finnish and very different feelings about it. I have seen and heard a couple of descriptions of people being ashamed of their Finnish in front of Finnish-speakers from Finland, since they knew they couldn't preak "correct Finnish" not knowing the modern Finnish vocabulary etc. but using Swedish words with Finnish grammatical endings. Mikael Niemi describes how the kids "talked Swedish with Finnish accent att Finnish with Swedish accent" not belonging to either group... the paragraph ends "We were nothing." As far as I can see, meänkieli is a part of a kind of "black is beautiful"-kind of movement involving many people whose Finnish is very far from a status where studying on Finnish-speaking universities would be a possibility. Trying to bring a language back to all the domains that it already has lost, quite some time ago - is it realistic? Is it worth the work? Or, do you settle for a kind of inbetween? i.e. maintaining what you have and being proud of it?
In all the four municipalities where Tornedalian Finnish a.k.a. Meänkieli is an official minority language, standard Finnish is also. The languages/whatever qualify for the same rights regaring kindergartens, care of the elderly etc. On the whole, Meänkieli and Sami is supposed to have some special kind of status above the other official minority languages such as Jiddish and standard Finnish. However, the only aspect I have seen where this means anything at all is that the qualification for children being given extra language classes in their mother tongue is lower for Sami children and kids of Tornedalian background. All others, including immigrant kids from Turkey, are given these classes if they talk the language at home - the Sami and Tornedalian kids are offered these classes even if they don't speak it at home.
Many people in Finland use comparisons with their own minority, the Swedish-speakers ,(maybe esp. the Swedish-speakers themselves do this) as a bases for their conclusions about Miänkieli/Tornedalian Finnish, but that comparison is not a very good one. History makes all the difference. / Habj 14:15, 10 October 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Posessive pronouns

"Possession is marked with a possessive suffix; separate possessive pronouns are unknown. Pronouns gain suffixes just as nouns do." Minun kirjani (My book). Explain to me how this is absence of separate possessive pronoun??? It's possible to leave the posessive pronoun out, but they certainly do exists / 82.128.187.188 00:51, 14 January 2006 (UTC)

Good question :) Yes, there is a reason. Minun kirjani is an emphasis: Minun kirjani on, ei ole sinun kirjasi, siis älä kirjoita tähän mitään! That is MY book, not YOUR book, so don't write anything inside! -andy 217.91.47.231 16:08, 2 February 2006 (UTC)
(Disclaimer: I am a native Finnish speaker, but I have no actual linguistic competence.) Finnish does not have separate possessive pronouns, since Finnish has a good case system, and it uses genitive cases of ordinary personal pronouns (for example, minun is the genitive case of minä) instead of possessive pronouns. Furthermore, the use of possessive suffixes seems to be in decline (at least in spoken Finnish), and the genitive cases of personal pronouns seem to be the prevalent way to indicate ownership. (At least for me, saying mun kirja is much more natural than kirjani.)Punainen Nörtti 17:59, 27 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] I reckon that adjectives on -lainen do NOT follow vowel harmony! (fairly sure)

Interestingly I am NOT a native Finn but it seems I know it better! (Compare to people who learn English and know grammar better and more in detail than a native UK resident!) It is definitely HELSINKILAINEN with *NO* Ä. Yes, Helsinki has bright harmony because of the sole usage of e and i. BUT ... lainen is an exception! I can look it up in my grammar (Fred Karlsson, blue book) where it clearly states that -lainen comes from a Swedish word. EVEN FINNS DO THIS WRONG! (They may do it "wrong" with people's names ONLY, though, because this is the exception of the exception! [Hämäläinen]). But HelsinkiLAINEN! 100% sure. [edit] yes I'm right (without looking on the following page first), but for absolute verification, I will supply the Finnish article also: [1] -andy 217.91.47.231 14:01, 1 February 2006 (UTC)

I'm sorry, vowel harmony is not a grammatical, but a morphophonological process. This means that the native speaker is right by definition. A native speaker opinion can be "wrong" only in the case the word is not understood properly; some people understand "tällainen" as a single word, although it is a contraction of "tän lainen". Understanding the word correctly restores the consistency of the rule. --Vuo 17:06, 2 February 2006 (UTC)
Well, I have one blue book by Karlsson right here (Karlsson, Fred: Finnish Grammar. Porvoo, Helsinki, Juva : WSOY, 1983. ISBN: 951-0-11627-0 (translated by Andrew Chesterman)) and I can not find anything to support your claim. In fact, it supports the opposite (page 196). Perhaps you need to give a more detailed reference? And I strongly doubt that -lAinen could be a swedism. Finnish has a lot of swedisms, like "tulee olemaan", but I believe -lAinen is pure Finnish. If you refer to the fact that word "Helsinki" is itself a loan from swedish, that wouldn't support your claim either. It comes from older swedish form "Helsinge", of which one would form "Helsingeläinen", not from contemporary Swedish name "Helsinfors", of which one would form "Helsingfors(i)lainen".
I also checked the formidable Iso suomen kielioppi. § 15 says that the only exceptions of vowel harmony are (in pure Finnish words containing only neutral vowels) merta and verta, and that if a word stem contains only neutral vowels, suffix vowel is a front vowel. According to § 17, if a loanword contains vowels from both groups, either back- or front vowel suffixes may be used (analyyttista ~ analyyttistä). But "helsinki" doesn't contain anything but neutral vowels! Furthermore, § 626 mentions the word "helsinkiläiset" as an example on how to use adjective as a substantive.
Hämäläinen is exception in it's word stem: by basic rule it should be *hämeläinen. But that makes no difference regarding vowel harmony.
What clarification does the Finnish Wikipedia article you referred provide? IMHO vowel harmony is better discussed in [[2]]. It is also consistent with Iso suomen kielioppi.
Look for the mentioning of TÄLLAINEN in wiki_fi. Would have to be TÄLLÄINEN if the rule had caught. -andy 217.91.47.231 16:14, 2 February 2006 (UTC)
The word "tällainen" follows the vowel harmony rule of compound words (that is, no vowel harmony). See [[3]], or for even better explanation [[4]]. The wiki_fi article also clearly says that status of tällainen is an exception, because it's not clear whether it's a compound word or a derived word. SGJ 16:25, 2 February 2006 (UTC)
I'll revert your edit, but I'd really like to know what exactly does your copy of Karlssons grammar says. SGJ 15:52, 2 February 2006 (UTC)
User:Vuo beated me in reverting speed by few seconds :-) SGJ 15:58, 2 February 2006 (UTC)

If something was left unclear, Rovaniemi -> RovaniemellÄ -> rovaniemelÄinen (typical to Rovaniemi; habitant of Rovaniemi) because -lainen/-läinen is yet another suffix not to thought to be related to 'kaltainen', 'lainen' words. Note the genetiv in 'Helsingin lainen'/ 'Helsingin kaltainen' (similar to Helsinki, reminding Helsinki).

Some grammar may accept hovering form 'analyyttistA' but I don't because the last vowel harmony rule detected traditionally has made the rule. I see that other rules will lead in chaos in Finnish language and the writer of the grammar has not understood his/her doings.

It is helsinkiläinen, with an Ä. If the grammar book by Karlsson states otherwise, it could easily be explained by the fact that he (the author) is not a native speaker. In "Rovaniemi" (which is a compound word) only the latter part, "niemi" counts, so that is why Ä is used. "Analyyttinen" is a loan word that is already unnatural for a Finnish ear because of the lack of vowel harmony, so I wouldn't count it as Finnish grammar at all. -a native Finnish speaker

Hmm.. I always thought that the -lainen ending comes from a natural extension of laji meaning type in English, which when it takes the -nen adjective ending becomes laji + -nen merged to form -lainen as a word ending meaning "typical of". I too was surprised to read Karlsson's claim that it came from Swedish. I thought most people would see the the laji connection to -lainen.--Tom 10:05, 3 December 2006 (UTC)

I have thought that -lainen and -läinen are in fact two suffixes in one. First -la/-lä indicating a place and then -(i)nen indicating an adjective. Like "puna" = red (noun), "punainen" = red (adjective), "punala" = a place associated with red (noun), "punalainen" = something or someone from a place associated with red, Or "joki" = river, "Jokela" = a place associated with river(s) and a real place name in Finland. Jokelalainen, "someone or something from a place called Jokela", so it has twice the same -la suffix that indicates a place, literally "the state of being from/like a place associated with a place associated with river(s)". But that's just what I have thought. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 81.175.134.236 (talk) 02:29, 8 January 2007 (UTC).

[edit] spooky

I see that the list of features which 'highlights the fact that Finnish is not an Indo-European language' is also true, every bit of it, for Zulu and Xhosa. Maybe they're related from pre-proto-world languages :) Joziboy 15 March 2006, 16:46 (UTC)

actually those features are quite common cross-linguistically, it's just that they happen to not be features found in Indo-European languages. --Krsont 15:31, 23 May 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Too much material?

There's a lot of material, mostly disorganized, in this article. I wonder if curiosities like "longest words" are really necessary? There are also a lot of lists and detailed discussions. Shouldn't these get separate articles? --Vuo 19:40, 17 April 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Morphophonology

Consonant gradation is a lenition process ... However, it is very common since it is found in the partitive case marker: if V is a single vowel, V+ta → Va, e.g. *vanha+ta → vanhaa.

I'd be curious about the resource of this. How I've been taught is that the fact that *vanha+ta would surface as vanhaa is not a result of consonant gradation, rather a historical change from the old partitive ending in which *-δa changed to -a. Historically that alternation could have bee na result of the previously more productive stress and grade alternations, but in a synchronic sense the partitive marker is considered to be -tA or -A. Any way, my feeling is that the lenition shown in this example is historical, not a synchronic phonological process.

The reason I'm not editing is because I want to know where (or perhaps when) this information came from, because I am suddenly somewhat unsure. --Ryan 10:45, 10 May 2006 (UTC)

I guess what I mean, is that mene? and menkää may be a sign of an alternation, however the imperative was historically *menek, in which there was no alternation (some dialects apparently preserve this?). Maybe I'm just missing the point that lenition from some underlying representation to some surface forms means that there is an alternation. Lauri Hakulinen's tome on the structure and development of Finnish (Suomen kielen rakenne ja kehitys) at least mentions nothing of some sort of grade alternation with this. A better example of grade alternations in stems might be -tOn vs. -ttOmA-, and so on. I'm still curious about the source for that partitive information.--Ryan 14:11, 11 May 2006 (UTC)

"karhu - bear"

Why is "bear" listed among the "important" words? Is one apt to run into bears frequently on a visit to Finland? "Beer" I can see, but...

Bears were a sacred sort of animal which were feared, as according to ancient Finnish beliefs. 'karhu' was originally part of a phrase that one could use to describe 'bears' without actually saying one of the many other words for them. The idea seems to have been that if you said the word, you could accidentally cause one to come by (I'd say summon, but that sounds a bit different). --Ryan 12:36, 10 June 2006 (UTC)
I removed "bear" - this is not a good argument for including it as an important word. Likewise, Anglo-Saxons may have believed in elfs but this does not make elf an important word in modern English. --AAikio 21:36, 3 July 2006 (UTC)
Wasn't it the other way around - the many other names were invented to avoid calling the beast by its real name "karhu"? JIP | Talk 09:15, 30 August 2006 (UTC)

No, the original word is(was) oksi.

[edit] Raamattu

Raamattu is NOT a loan from russian, it is from estonian language. Beliewe me, im from Finland.

No, it's not. Of course, Estonian has raamat "book", but this comes from Russian as well. As for the idea that being from Finland would make one competent in Finnish etymology, this is rather much like saying that anyone who has a heart can perform cardiovascular surgery. --AAikio 10:37, 3 July 2006 (UTC)
The original word probably being Greek 'gramma' or 'grammata' -> Russian 'gramota'? Clarifer 12:32, 9 July 2006 (UTC)
Yes, that is the case.--JyriL talk 17:36, 9 July 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Classification

I edited the section Classification, because the previous version confused typological features with genetic classification. Typology is irrelevant to linguistic ancestry, and thus many of the features that were claimed to prove Finnish's affiliation with Finno-Ugric, or its unrelatedness to Indo-European, really prove nothing at all. Also, the claim that postpositions are "uncommon" in Finnish is false, so I corrected this as well. --AAikio 08:39, 9 July 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Unfamiliar vocabulary?

"There are few languages closely related to Finnish, thus making the vocabulary unfamiliar."

Can this be said? This sounds like all the other languages in the world but Finnic languages would be closely related. I would say that the norm is that a foreign language has unfamiliar vocabulary. Like Chinese vocabulary isn't familiar for an Arab speaker, Japanese vocabulary isn't familiar for an Spanish speaker and Sanskrit vocabulary isn't familiar for an English speaker. So I don't think that it's necceccary to mention that Finnish has an unfamiliar vocabulary. (Besides, Finnish has loaned greatly from IE languages.)

I think that someone has an agenda to push for making an impression that Finnish is difficult. To that I can say: Finnish is not difficult, it's just not related to your mothertongue. (Unless you're Estonian, in which case I'm screwed.) Internationally ranked, Finnish is comparable to Icelandic, but not to Chinese, Thai or other such languages which use totally different phonemic contrasts and grammatical principles. Compared to IE and some other groups, Finnish has very few crosslinguistically unusual contrasts. Therefore, it can be said, that Finnish is not an especially difficult language, it's just different from its neighboring languages. As a personal opinion, I might add that Turkish and Italian speakers acquire a virtually accent-, and error-free Finnish pronunciation relatively quickly. Furthermore, it is important to study the context in which Finnish is typically learnt. Finnish is usually not the second, or even the third, but just a "hobby" language for many people interested in linguistics. As such, as a relatively foreign language with its own vocabulary, it is a massive project to learn, as with any language not immediately related to your mothertongue. --Vuo 14:55, 11 July 2006 (UTC)
I'm not Estonian. I'm Finnish, so I guess you're not screwed. But anyway, I think the article should anyway address the reputation of Finnish being a difficult language by giving possible reasons for the reputation, like Finnish as an non IE-language in the middle of IE languages, the way foreign people get familiar with Finnish language etc (although this might be original research). I only disagree in giving the vocabulary as one reason for the claimed difficulty.--Shubi 16:51, 17 July 2006 (UTC)

Why are so many Finns hesistant to speak swedish? In many cases when talking to Finns, they turn over to English when spoken to in Swedish. I do not think it should be necessary to have to speak English to an Scandinavian Neighbour.

~Norwegian.

Finland is not in Scandinavia. It is one of the Nordic countries. While there is some overlap, Finland remains apart from the group of Norway, Sweden, and Denmark. And as for speaking English, even though that language imposes its own imperialism on Europe, by using it one can at least avoid the much more sore issue of recent Swedish-language imperialism. CRCulver 00:00, 18 July 2006 (UTC)
One reason also probably might be that Finnish speaking Finns aren't all that good in speaking Swedish. I myself have studied English for nine years and use it constantly and encounter it more often than Swedish (for example right now) whereas I have studied Swedish for six years and have had little practical use for it (even though having lived most of my life in bilingual cities), so I'd rather speak English with a fellow Nordic citizen. I'm more able to communicate in English and I's say this is quite common among Finns. If I'd speak Swedish my output would be something like "jag heter Topias" "jag har en svart kat" "jag tycker om jordgubbar" "jag förstodd inte vad du menar". In my case this has nothing to do with some attitude against Swedish language. It's a nice language I would like to know better, but my skills are just utter crap. (And Finnish is a difficult language? Oh my how many sleeples, angst filled nights I used to spend in high school wondering the miracles, oddities and exceptions of exceptions in Swedish grammar! :D ) --Shubi 15:41, 18 July 2006 (UTC)
I fancy myself very good with written Swedish, but I am not so good at understanding spoken Swedish. Particularly riksvenska (real Swedish) is hard to understand. Finnish-Swedish is easier because of its more familiar intonation. JIP | Talk 17:44, 27 August 2006 (UTC)

Perhaps the reason behind the line of thought that Finnish is somehow a more difficult language to learn than other foreign languages derives from the fact that many Indo-European languages are so similar (to eachother). People that have travelled around, and in that context visited Finland, or that have worked there have mostly come from the European countries and have been used to the idea that all languages have say articles, prepositions, etc. and that they are just different in different languages. Spanish is more similar to Sewedish that to Finnish in the above mentioned sense, and so is German, English, Italian, Greek etc. For any person familiar with IE languages either as their mother tongue, or via English, French, or Spanish as the international languages, there is relatively little "already familiar stuff" in Finnish. In other words, the unfamiliar vocabulary arguement is valid because Finland has been internationally interacting mainly with European cultures? Secondly there are visual superficial feature in finnish that make it seem difficult, such as the relatively long words, suffixing, double consonants etc.

tp

Using articles is not an Indo-European feature. For example, Classical Latin doesn't have them.
The similar vocabulary of English and e.g. Italian is a result of massive borrowing from Latin. I've heard that over 50% of English vocabulary comes from Latin (including "basic" vocabulary, like "family"). Muhaha 19:09, 11 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Finland - bug

When I click the link "Finland", the browser shows a strange dialog - why? -- Pavel Jelínek ,pjel@centrum.cz


I tried it again today (17th august 06) and the bug occurs no more. Should I delete this paragraph from this Talk page? -- Pavel Jelínek ,pjel@centrum.cz

[edit] Tietokone

tietokone "computer" (literally: "knowledge machine")

Actually word tietokone is originally a short for tietojenkäsittelykone (information processing machine). http://www.tuug.fi/~jaakko/tutkimus/suominen_tietokonesana.html

The original word tietojenkäsittelykone is not a synthesised word, so this should be corrected.

[edit] There are two "Teach yourself" books - help requested

The article contained a description of a book by "Terttu Leney", with ISBN 0-340-56174-2. But the book with that ISBN is a different "Teach Yourself Finnish" book, by the author "Arthur H. Whitney". Both authors wrote books which were published under the name "Teach Yourself Finnish". Sometimes they are called "Teach Yourself Finnish Complete Course" or "Finnish (Teach Yourself)". But I don't know which exact title is the definitive title for which book.

I don't own either book. One problem is that there was a description of the book, but I don't know which of the two books the author(s) of the description was talking about. If someone has either or both of those books, could they please add or check the descriptions in the article? Thanks. (See Finnish language#English_books) Gronky 16:06, 2 September 2006 (UTC)

If someone is wondering what to say about each books, it would be interesting (at least for me) to hear which is more suited to beginners, which has better audio teaching of pronunciation (do they take care to clearly convey the sounds, or do they speak too fast). Gronky 17:07, 2 September 2006 (UTC)

To make the page correct, I should move the comments (for we-don't-know-which-book) here. Here they are between horizontal lines:

Quite good: the pace is quite fast as it covers all of FFF1 and some of FFF2, and includes exercises.
There are a couple of irritations: the chapters are long and rambling without any clear focus, and the vocabularies don't always contain all the words used in the dialogs.

[edit] Translation of example

Can someone please add translation of the example in the article?

Hyväntahtoinen aurinko katseli heitä. Se ei missään tapauksessa ollut heille vihainen. Kenties tunsi jonkinlaista myötätuntoa heitä kohtaan. Aika velikultia. — Väinö Linna: Unknown Soldier; these words were also inscribed in the 20 mk note.

Thanks. --Amir E. Aharoni 11:11, 6 September 2006 (UTC)

"The benevolent sun watched them. By no means was it angry at them. Perhaps it felt a kind of compassion towards them. Jolly good brothers." JIP | Talk 17:08, 10 September 2006 (UTC)

[edit] "D" sound in Finnish

The "d" sound is fairly rare in Finnish, but there is an interesting example in the book Antero Vipunen, with dialogue where almost every word has a "d":

Pyydän saada uuden köyden, edellinen oli täydellisesti mädäntynyt.
En tiedä, tohdinko, taidan tehdä tyhmyyden.

In English:

I ask for a new rope, the previous one was throughly rotten.
I don't know if I dare, I think I might do a stupid thing.

JIP | Talk 13:35, 25 September 2006 (UTC)

[edit] sama as a borrowed word

Just confirming, sama in Finnish seems to be of Indo-European origin, given that the Sanskrit word (and also for Malay from it which borrows) also seems to have this. Why isn't it a more obvious candidate to mention though? John Riemann Soong 04:08, 27 September 2006 (UTC)

Finn. sama is a Scandinavian loan (cf. Swedish samma 'same'). I didn't quite understand why this word should be mentioned? There are hundreds if not thousands of Scandinavian loans in Finnish.--AAikio 06:00, 27 September 2006 (UTC)
Oh, okay. I thought the borrowing would have been much earlier. John Riemann Soong 10:34, 27 September 2006 (UTC)
Sama is a Germanic loan, but older than Scandinavian, possibly as old as Proto-Germanic. The word appears in every Finnic language except for Livonian. (Häkkinen, Nykysuomen etymologinen sanakirja)--JyriL talk 21:54, 24 December 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Set up redirect

Someone should set up the non-existent link "anticausative", found under the heading "Lexicon" to redirect to the actual page on Anticausal verbs. I would, but I'm really not sure how (so if anyone could tell me how...?)

[edit] Input requested

Hi. We could use some outside input over at Categories for discussion. In particular, here we have two people arguing over what to call Category:Finland-Swedish, and another couple of opinions could be very helpful. Thanks! -GTBacchus(talk) 20:57, 4 November 2006 (UTC)


[edit] Biased view!

I'm not very serious here, but the section on colloquial language says that:

onko(s) teillä — onks teil(lä) "do you have?" (vowel deletion)

While some might say this others say it more proper, there is no s: Onko teillä -> Onk teil.

Whoever wrote this must live in Helsinki since they claim that the Helsinki slang / uusimaa version of the vowel deletation is "the colloquial version". That version is barbarism :)

tp

The only people I have heard say "onk teil" instead of "onks teil" are Turkuans. So obviously you must claim that the Turku dialect version is the proper one. JIP | Talk 10:08, 12 December 2006 (UTC)


You wouldn't say! tp

Mä en oo tosissaan koskaan kuullu kenenkään sanovan "onk teil". "Onks teil" is proper colloquial Finnish (whatever "proper" colloquial Finnish is anyway...). Colloquialisms are pretty much tied to regional dialects, take the word minä for example, for a person living up north mie is the corresponding colloquialism while people here in Southern Finland use mä instead (and think that people who use mie are hicks). How can you take anyone who says miulla seriously anyway? It sounds like they're referring to a damn cat in the third person.
Oh, and let's not forget about myö, either... Whoever thinks all Finnish people are grumpy and quiet and speak monotonously (like Kimi Räikkönen, infamously) has obviously never met a person from Savo. -84.239.157.217 20:42, 12 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Three-sentence translation request for a barnstar on Etusivu

Mzlla is a Wikipedian primarily active on Etusivu and on Meta-Wiki. He's done very useful work handling the Wikimedia-wide spam blacklist. Some of us at WikiProject Spam have given him a barnstar (well, actually a spamstar) including on his Finnish user talk page. (At least I hope it was his Finnish talk page -- I had no idea what all the Finnish editing commands meant!) In any event, if someone has the time, would they be willing to translate the three brief sentences? Thanks! --A. B. 19:44, 4 December 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Patrick

The article Patrick has the spelling of the name "Patrick" in most major European languages, but not in Finnish. Could someone who knows (presumably one of the editors of this page about the Finnish language) add the Finnish spelling to that article? Thanks. —Lowellian (reply) 19:01, 9 January 2007 (UTC)

It's a bit difficult because there is no direct Finnish equivalent of Patrick. I assume that the closest would be the same as in Swedish, i.e. Patrik. However, all Finnish people named Patrick or similar that I have known are spelled Patrick. JIP | Talk 13:16, 12 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Total speakers

The number refers to Ethnologue.com [5]. Is that really a reliable source? The data there seems to be quite old.. --213.186.251.20 20:21, 20 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Finnish a minority language in parts of Sweden?

The current state of the article claims:

"It is also an official language in Finland and an official minority language in some parts of Sweden, in the form of standard Finnish as well as Meänkieli, and in Norway in the form of Kven."

Isn't Finnish actually an official minority language with no specific geographic constraint? Meänkieli is obviously constrained to NE Sweden (Tornedalen - hence the Swedish name Tornedalsfinska - "Tornedalen-Finnish") where it is autochthonously spoken, but Finnish (as it is used today in Sweden) is in practice a recent immigrant language which has no specific geographical area associated to it (even though some cities have a very high relative number of finns). Jens Persson (213.67.64.22 19:23, 21 February 2007 (UTC))

[edit] "Body"

Finnish has three different words for "body".

  • Ruumis: The oldest word. Originally equally referred to living and dead bodies, now mostly (sometimes, almost exclusively) referring to dead bodies. "They found his body by the river" can only be translated with the word ruumis.
  • Keho: A new word, invented in the 20th century. Exclusively refers to living bodies, invented only to distinguish between the living and the dead. A Finnish joke is about a man who went to a spa, and asked the masseuse to was his keho. The masseuse replied: "I can was your ruumis but you can wash your keho all by yourself."
  • Vartalo: The body (usually living), in an aesthetic or technical context, where the living/dead or philosophical viewpoints are not an issue. Primarily used in medicine when referring to body parts, and in art when depicting the body. Body painting is called vartalonmaalaus in Finnish.

I am fairly sure this distinction is unique to Finnish. However I don't know how to incorporate (pun not intended) it into the article. JIP | Talk 20:26, 21 February 2007 (UTC)

You forgot the counterpart of keho. The word invented for the dead body at the same time is kalmo but that is seldom used. --MPorciusCato 06:58, 22 February 2007 (UTC)
In fact I did remember the word kalmo but I didn't know it was so new, I thought it was an ancient word like ruumis, so I didn't include it. JIP | Talk 15:38, 22 February 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Sources

This source[6] has the 1993 statistics... Nowadays there are more people in Finland who speak Finnish as their native language. It also, stupidly, counts the so called Torne valley Finnish as a separate language - that division is used only in Sweden, not in Finland. Its merely a dialect. --Jaakko Sivonen 18:08, 1 March 2007 (UTC)

Jaakko is right on both accounts, the number of people speaking Finnish is larger than Ethnologue reports (in contrast, the percentage of people in Finland speaking Finnish is lower now than in 1993). And counting the Finnish dialect in Northern Sweden as a separate language, as the Swedes do, is just politics and has nothing to do with linguistics. There are many Finnish dialects that differ more from Standard Finnish than the dialect in Northern Sweden does. JdeJ 01:48, 2 March 2007 (UTC)
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