First of May spoonerisms

Happy First of May! In Finland, First of May is a huge carnival-like celebration. In Germany you barely notice it. We went for a First of May walk and all we saw was a red balloon and a pile of puke. Can't get much lamer than that.

And since First of May is also the day of bad student humor, this episode is about a category of bad jokes I often miss in my current language environment. Kitchen linguistics presents: sananmuunnos (word transform). Sananmuunnos jokes are all about dirty anatomical expressions straight from elementary school backyards, preferably combined with religious vocabulary, so if you don't like that kind of humor... why are you still reading this blog?

Seriously speaking, it's somewhat non-trivial to explain why such childish and inappropriate jokes are entertaining also for people who consider themselves intellectual. At the end of the blog, I'll tell my guess.

So, sananmuunnos works like this:

pehmeä jänis (a soft bunny) - jähmeä penis (a stiff penis)

There are a couple of extra rules for how diphthongs and long/short vowels work, then just a dash of vowel harmony... all of those come naturally to us Finns, a certain way to transform just "feels correct" (or produces a result that means something naughty).

An example of a Finnish sananmuunnos joke: "Vaikka piha on liukas niin pulu ei kaadu." (Even though the courtyard is slippery, the pigeon doesn't fall over.) It's left to the listener to find the applicable transforms, so the sentence becomes "Vaikka liha on piukas niin kalu ei puudu." (Even though the flesh is tight, the cock won't harden.)

Sananmuunnos jokes are similar to - but not the same as - spoonerism in English and Spoonerismus in German. Often they follow a slightly different logic than the Finnish ones:

"Three cheers for our queer old dean!" (rather than "dear old queen")

Or, the transformed version is something somebody accidentally says: "Ich werde zu deinem Geburtstag nachher noch Buchen kacken, äh, Kuchen backen." (I'd shit books… beech trees (Hello, I'm an idiot!) eh, bake a cake, for your birthday.)

In the pure Finnish sananmuunnos jokes, the transformed version is never said aloud.

Now that's the theory. To illustrate the importance of sananmuunnos to the Finnish society, I have two anecdotes.

The first one (link in Finnish): A colleague of my mother in law died, and he was famous enough to have an obituary published in the main newspaper. In addition to his day job as a teacher he was a sananmuunnos hobbyist. And so it was written in the obituary that he wrote a book Paljas uneksija ("Bare dreamer" - although "uljas paneksija" is "a brave fucker") under names "Rudolf Ankku" ("Adolf Runkku" means "Adolf Wank") and "Pertti Joffán" ("jortti peffaan" means "dick into butt"). "I'm not sure if such jokes are appropriate in an obituary", I commented. "That person's obituary wouldn’t have been appropriate without such jokes", said my mother in law.

The second one (link in Finnish): To increase the voting rate in the Finnish church elections, the Finnish (Lutheran) church published a video, written by an independent screenwriter, where animated characters were debating the role of the church in the modern society. One of the characters criticized the "musty masses" of the church. Only that "musty masses" (tunkkaiset messut) is a sananmuunnos of "menstruating pussies" (menkkaiset tussut). "Oops, we didn't realize", commented the representative of the church. "Maybe it's a sananmuunnos, maybe it’s not", said the screenwriter.

And finally, my guess on why all this is socially appropriate: since the naughty version is never said aloud, sananmuunnos allows Finns to use weird, cryptic and improbable expressions, and all the naughtiness is in the head of the listener. Maybe the listener won't notice and just thinks "well, that was a weird choice of words", or maybe he notices, and that creates a shared, secret joke between them.

A successful shirt

I recently had a confusing clothing discussion with a German friend. We were sorting, counting and noting down some baby clothes I was borrowing from her.

There were some like these:

I just put all of them into the same pile, counted them together and referred to all of them as Hemd. I had learned in school that paita = das Hemd, and in Finnish all these are different types of paitas, especially in the colloquial language. From the top: neulepaita (knitted shirt), paita (shirt), T-paita (T-shirt) and... I guess another paita. We do have a separate colloquial word for a hoodie (huppari), but nobody would be surprised if you said "I'll put my paita on" and then put your hoodie on. Basically the same thing as when you "go out for a coffee" but drink tea instead. Similarly, paita is often used in the broad sense of an upper body garment (except a bikini top, which is definitely not paita). The most typical paita would be a thin, long-sleeve cotton shirt without buttons:

But it turns out, Hemd only means a specific kind of paita, namely this (in Finnish kauluspaita):

And the other paitas are Pullover, Jäckchen, T-Shirt, and so on. We eventually de-confused the discussion and ended up making more than one pile of baby paitas - still probably less than a German would, because I said I'm not able to tell the difference between some types of garments because they're both paita to me.

If a Finnish novel is translated into German, and the main character puts a paita on, it should be translated differently based on what kind of person he is. Maybe he puts a Hemd on if it fits his character, but it can also be something else. A good human translator would be able to pick an appropriate word, but I can imagine this problem is very difficult for machine translation! Using the wrong word would make the atmosphere all wrong, for example if a rascal puts a button-down shirt on and goes out, the German reader would be left wondering why he's suddenly dressing up so formally.

In a similar vein, I recently read a column about the differences of being successful and being successful. Namely, there are two words for "to succeed" in Finnish, onnistua and menestyä. Onnistua (in this context) means more like "to produce something of good quality" and menestyä more like "to produce something popular" or "to rank highly compared to others". Similarly, there are two words which roughly translate to successful, onnistunut (something which has high quality) and menestynyt (something which has gained popularity). The column was about how we should strive to "onnistua" and not "menestyä", that is, we should focus on quality and not popularity / winning. It went on to list examples, like, an athlete should strive to onnistua (perform as well as he can) instead of menestyä (it might be possible to win even if you under-perform if the others are even worse, and it's also tempting to cheat in order to win, whereas cheating won't help you to onnistua). And at work, we should also try to onnistua (do our job well) instead of menestyä (achieve a high position).

I hope nobody needs to translate that column into English! In many contexts onnistua and menestyä would be translated into "to succeed" / "to achieve" / "to accomplish", but I don't think these English words are able to express the difference the column focuses on.

"To achieve" is defined as "successfully bring about or reach (a desired objective or result) by effort, skill, or courage" or "to succeed in something" or "to become successful, to reach a goal". 

And "to succeed" is defined as "to happen or terminate according to desire / have the desired result or to accomplish what is attempted or intended".

The dictionary definition of "to succeed" matches "onnistua" better, but if we say "she has been successful in her career", we'd use it in the sense of menestyä. We can also say "she has achieved a high position" to mean the same thing. To say that somebody wrote a book of good quality (which was not necessarily popular), I wouldn't use any of these words, I'd just say "she wrote a great book". "She wrote a successful book" would mean the book was popular. It would be weird to say "the movie was a success" to mean that it was a great movie although it didn't sell well.

(But anyway, as in all kitchen linguistics episodes, this is just my view on these words as a non-native English speaker, and I'm welcoming further insights into what these words mean and enlightening example usages.)

(A note to Germans, successful is spelled with one L. It can be also thought of something full of success but that's how it's spelled anyway. It's one of the most common misspellings I see in when I read English texts written by Germans.)

Yorma

Being a bit of a name geek, choosing a name for our kid was a Thing. Not a thing that requires long discussions - I believe that big decisions are best made on a whim. We chose an international name, and a colleague of mine, Mr C., was disappointed that we didn't use the opportunity to give a weird Finnish name with a lot of vowels and umlauts. And indeed, we could've chosen a name like Aino, Päivi, Päivä, Aija, Eija, Aila, Eila, Tuula or even Unnaluuna if we went really overboard, or for a boy, Kyösti, Päiviö, Yrjö (see below), Yrjänä, Pyry, Syksy, Kuisma or Eino. Eino would've been a confusing name for Germans, since it's a boys' name but pronounced the same way as Aino which is a girls' name. Naming twins Eino and Aino would be really evil. For the English-speaking world, Finnish male names Kari and Toni have some confusion potential too.

In Germany, there's a shop called Yorma's. I find it hilarious and probably other Finns do too...

Jorma (which is probably pronounced the same way as Yorma, since the Finnish J is pronounced like Y in "yo", not like J in "jail") is a Finnish name, most popular in the generation born in 1940s - 1950s. Since then, it has acquired the side meaning of a penis (so it actually could be accurately translated as Dick) and understandably decreased in popularity.

A typical Jorma would look like this:

The picture is of a Finnish celebrity who is not called Jorma, but Juha.

You might have heard that in the US, a company leader of a big company is more probably called John than a woman. Finns made their own statistic: a Finnish company leader is more probably called Juha than a woman.

I promised more information about Yrjö, which is also an old Finnish name, with an even older sound than Jorma. Since its' peak times, it has acquired a side meaning of "puke". Curiously, it's also the Finnish translation of the name George from the times when people used to translate names. While I was pregnant, I threw up more than 130 times (I actually kept count, though there was one day when I lost count around 8), and we joked that if it's a boy, we'll name him Yrjö. Yrjö is also the middle name of my father, so we could've gotten away with it. Luckily (for her), we didn't get a boy.

The most common first name - last name combination in Finland is Timo Virtanen (see a list of other common combinations here). There are 233 of them. Timo Virtanen is a pretty boring name. A typical Timo Virtanen would look like this:

This again is a Finnish celebrity, who's not called Timo but Matti.

Matti is the Finnish version of John in the sense of "John / Jane Doe". in Finnish they are called "Matti / Maija Meikäläinen" (meikäläinen is an informal word for "one of us"). In German, "Max / Anne Mustermann" is used in many contexts. "Mustermann" is apparently translated "paragon", but since "paragon" was not part of my active vocabulary, I would've translated it as "Pattern-man" instead. For other languages, see here.

The page also contains similar placeholder names for things. I could write a separate blog post trying to explain a Finnish name for a generic, unspecified or unnecessary machine, "hilavitkutin", which makes no sense at all but sounds like a convincing name for a machine that actually does something (it will most probably "vitkuttaa" (verb) "hila"s (noun) but neither of them means anything sensemaking in this context).

I also want to note that this post is about given names, and there is a whole lot to say about surnames - I'll write a separate post about that. I won't write a post about naming volcanoes, since the Icelandic are giving them so ridiculous names, like Eyjafjallajökull, that there's nothing reasonable to say about the topic.

The more the stupider?

There is a saying in English, "the more the merrier". In Finnish, there isn't an equivalent saying that I know of. Instead, we say "stupidity intensifies (lit. condenses) in a crowd" ("joukossa tyhmyys tiivistyy"). It means that people sometimes do stupid things in a group - things they wouldn't do alone.

It's probably not a surprise that Finns have a negative attitude towards groups, especially if you have seen this picture of a bus stop in Finland:

I think it's just wise to stand outside of the stabbing distance...

One American thing Finns ha-- umm... are not very fond of, is that a stranger might start a conversation with you in a grocery store. Stranger in this context is somebody you are not best friends with. We want to buy our groceries alone! (And wait for the bus alone.)

Finns consider "not disturbing people" one of the greatest virtues, and that's why we have such a restrictive social code regarding when it's okay to start a conversation (or even say hello). In many situations we assume that others want to be left alone and yet we secretly hope that somebody would socialize with us. So tragic.

I'm slowly getting used to the question "How are you doing" / "Wie geht's?" in the non-literal sense. For example, at work I try to answer with a cheerful "Oh, pretty good", as instructed by an American colleague. But I think I always have a stupid facial expression when I say it, so my colleagues probably think I'm crazy.

One very confusing situation is when a doctor greets me with this question, so... what am I supposed to answer? It feels so stupid to say I'm doing well - obviously I'm not doing well since I need to see a doctor!

Most pregnant

Since I've successfully finished being pregnant some time ago, here it comes: the pregnancy kitchen linguistics post!

In addition to having a bun in the oven, the word "pregnant" means "Having numerous possibilities or implications; full of promise; abounding in ability, resources", and the most common non-pregnancy-related usage is of course "a pregnant pause".

(Curiously, there are also comparative and superlative forms for "pregnant" - and at some point "most pregnant" was indeed very descriptive.)

However, the English word doesn't give justice to the 24/7/40 feeling of "kill me, kill me now" the same way the corresponding Finnish word does. "Raskaus" (pregnancy) means literally "heaviness", but in addition to "heavy", "raskas" can mean "tedious", "difficult", "painful", or "sad". The origin is maybe (this is kitchen linguistics so we don't really care) the Latin-based "gravidity" (note: gravity).

Side track: Germans, so politically correct. Before moving to Germany, when my husband was browsing jobs online, he saw job titles like "Software Engineer (m / w)" and asked me what "m / w" meant. I said "well, it could mean männlich / weiblich (male / female), but that would be a bit silly, I don't know...". Turns out it really means that. Names of occupations such as "Engineer" have a much stronger association to the male gender than in English, and if you use "Engineer" as is, it'll mean "male engineer". There are several linguistic and typographical hacks and forms of varying awkwardness to make words include both genders.

Another instance of German online political correctness can be found on university websites: Wintersemester is abbreviated "WS", but Sommersemester is abbreviated "SoSe". After a second, it's obvious why.

However, Germans have no problems with abbreviating Schwangerschaft (pregnancy) "SS" in the colloquial Internet. Once I felt slightly weird clicking a discussion thread link "Lachsschinken in der SS" (after googling whether it's allowed to eat this type of ham). For a moment I feared that the discussion might after all be about the culinary preferences of the said organization...

By the way, Germans also colloquially abbreviate Muttermund (cervix, literally "mother mouth") "MuMu", which is cutely creepy or creepily cute depending on which way you look at it.

Ludwig Theodor Theodor

In the last two weeks, I've had the following discussion almost every day (ton of paperwork, the post strike, missing letters, spelling difficulties).

"Heinrich, Ökonom, Ludwig, Theodor, Theodor, Ärger"

"Hä? Also Heinrich, Ökonom, Ludwig, Ludwig, Theodor..."

"Nein, Ludwig Theodor Theodor!"

So like this:

And not:

(How hard can it be?)

Here's a useful bit of information for non-Germans trying to get by in German: Buchstabiertafel. Curiously, Ä is Äquator, which is spelled with e in most countries (equator), the same for Ökonom (economist). And both Äquator and Ärger are pronounced with E, at least in my opinion (but I already observed that Finns and Germans perceive the boundary between Ä and E differently).

Underweardrunkenness

The German media has found the Finnish word "kalsarikännit" and they apparently find it funny.

I wanted to offer a deeper look into this word, so that Germans and other non-Finns could appreciate the nuances better.

As explained, the word consists of two parts: "kalsari", the singular of "underpants" (kalsarit), and "kännit" (drunkenness). Especially, "kalsarit" refers to old-fashioned male underwear, in the 70s style.

It's also often associated with an essential garment in Finland, long underwear ("pitkät kalsarit"), worn by both genders.

Coincidentally, I'm posting this in July, which is the only month in Finland which you might be able to survive without long underwear.

"Kännit" (plural) or the singular "känni" is usually translated as "drunkenness", but the English word is not nearly as versatile as the Finnish one. For example, you can "take a känni / kännit" and that means getting drunk. You can also attach adjectives to it, e.g., "that was a horrible känni" to describe how it was being drunk. And when you're "in känni" ("kännissä"), you're drunk.

There's a well-known song "jouluaattona kännissä", "drunk in Christmas Eve". And because the French pronunciation is so weird, it sounds exactly the same as "jouluaattona Cannesissa", "Christmas Eve in Cannes". I think it's worth travelling to Cannes during Christmas time just to be able to use this joke in a Facebook status.

(This joke was ruthlessly stolen from my better half without asking him. Haha! Note: he should read the small print of our marriage agreement.)

Your mileage may vary

I've always hated the English saying "your mileage may vary" because I intuitively misunderstand it every time I read it.

I associate "mileage" with experience. The more "mileage" a person has, the more experienced he/she is. To me the saying reads "you might disagree with the statement I made because you're so inexperienced". Every time. Even though I know it doesn't mean that, but simply "it may be different in your experience".

So it's a pretty annoying saying, in my opinion. YMMV.

Afterthoughts

I just recently learned that "der After" in German means... well, butthole. If you're a Finn, this should ring a bell; "ahteri" in Finnish means butt in general (and also the back part of a ship).

It's a mystery how I managed to live in Germany for almost 4 years without bumping into this word. Even more mysterious is how Germans manage to eat After Eight with a straight face.

After this realization, many English concepts acquire unexpected side meanings. For example, "aftershave" might mean something completely different to Germans and the English speaking world.

I had also wondered previously why many German-speaking countries use the French "après ski" instead of "after ski". Maybe this is the reason.

Speaking of butts, the Finnish post just recently published these stamps to honour Tom of Finland, the artist who basically invented the leather-driven gay style.

Too bad I had just sent a bunch of unnecessary but required papers to the tax office when I got my set of stamps. I really had to fight the urge to re-send the papers, just in case, and of course with the stamp pictured on the right side.

Life is short, mostly dark and gloomy

Christmas is almost here!

To understand better the weird culture I'm coming from, you can have a look at some popular Finnish Christmas Carols (short summaries in English).

Downside: The list is depressingly accurate: most Finnish Christmas carols are exactly like this. There are only few which are neutral instead of outright melancholic, as in, they're not directly mentioning death, poverty or misery. All the cheerful ones are imports and frowned upon by real Finns.

Upside: There are metal versions for most of the songs.

Put out the wrong way

There's an incredibly useful Finnish phrase which I'd really need in other languages too, but it doesn't exist, as far as I can tell.

Here it goes: "put out the wrong way" ("väärin sammutettu") as in, the fire was put out but it was done the wrong way. It is used for mocking a situation where someone cannot legitimately criticize the end result but they criticize the process instead.

The story behind is that a fire brigade is pissed off because a volunteer fire brigade got to the scene first and put out the fire. The real fire brigade arrives and the chief says that the volunteers did put out the fire, but they did it the wrong way.

In everyday life, it can be used like this:

"Isn't this cake delicious?"

"Well yes, but did you really need to use all three bowls for making it?"

"... put out the wrong way."

It's especially useful in kitchens since there are many ways to cook, and the taste should matter more than how the cooking was done.

Get well well

Subjected to boredom, brains tend to generate random thoughts. Here's one from me and one from my better half (you can try to guess which is which).

1) In most languages you say "Get well soon", but in German you say "Gute Besserung", to wish that Besserung (the process of getting well) is not quick but... good. So literally this means "Get well well". Why would the Germans say that? How can the Besserung not be gut?

2) If Big Bang Theory had a porn parody (link NSFW obviously), what would it be called? It cannot be called Big Bang Theory because the original series is already called that. Big BANG Theory?

Sausage

I'd like to tell you about a funny language situation that happened in a suburban train this week. I boarded the train after a middle-age-plus woman. She walked along the aisle, looking for a seat. There was an empty one, she didn't take it, so I took it. Then she changed her mind, turned back, saw that I had taken the seat, and mumbled: "... Wurst..." (sausage). I was so proud that I understood why she would mumble that! ("Wurst" = "egal" = "the same" = something you don't care about. "Es ist mir Wurst" = "It's sausage to me" = "I don't care about it".) I'm sure that would've utterly confused me 3 years ago. Why would the lady mumble "sausage"?

Next topic: random things people tell me because I have a language blog.

1) Apropos mnemonics

There's a German memonic: MesseR - Rechts (knife - right) + GabeL - Links (fork - left), so, when setting a table, the knife goes to the right and the fork to the left.

And a Finnish joke about a mnemonic: Why do women like to drive a Volvo? Because it has such a handy mnemonic on the steering wheel: VolvO, V like "vasemmalle" (to the left) and O like "oikealle" (to the right). Notable was that this joke was told by a German, and I had never heard of it before.

2) Apropos comma and its usefulness in marriages

http://saetzeundschaetze1.files.wordpress.com/2013/09/satzzeichen-retten.png

By the way, an offensive Finnish expression for somebody who pays too much attention to detail is literally "comma fucker" (pilkunnussija). An almost equivalent German term is "Korinthenkacker" (raisin pooper).

There are plenty of creative ways to insult people in German. For example, you can say that someone is a "Schattenparker" (somebody who parks his car in the shade), "Warmduscher" (somebody who takes warm showers), Frauenversteher (somebody who understands women), Jeans-Bügler (somebody who irons his jeans) or Handschuhschneeballwerfer (somebody who throws snowballs with his gloves on).

More entertainment

Hi there, friends of kitchenlinguistics, and greetings from France.

By the way, the alleged inability and / or unwillingness of the French people to speak English is not true.

In the last post I relayed a traffic joke ("Straßenunterhaltung"), so here's a traffic sign in France which German-speaking people might find funny:

The actual theme for today's post is: jokes which require knowing multiple languages to be funny (and even then it's questionable).

This kind of loose or awkward connection between topics is called a "donkey's bridge" ("aasinsilta") in Finnish. The term is clearly adopted from German ("Eselsbrücke"), but it means something different in German: "a clever method used to remember something".

So here's a joke from my husband:

"What's the slogan for French low-carb enthusiasts? No pain, no gain."

(Pain = bread in French.)

And one from me:

"Penis size is not normally distributed. There is a long tail."

("Tail" in German, "Schwanz", is a slang word for penis.)

I tried to think how to end this post smoothly, but I couldn't come up with anything. What's the word for a clumsy or an awkward ending?

Full body sweat

My better half and me fear that our Finnish will over time become a relic of how Finnish was in 2011 when we moved out of the country. We won't lose the language, because we still speak it together (as much as married people speak, anyway), but at some point we will hopelessly lose touch with how it's used in Finland.

To prevent this, we often ask our Finnish visitors to give us an update on what's going on in the new language. One time it resulted in a hilarious sweat-related conversation which I will relay here.

In the summer, your might sweat so much that dark spots appear in your T-shirt around your armpits. In modern Finnish, these spots are apparently called "policemen" (poliisit).

Then the discussion turned into Finnish sweat-related army slang. It turns out that there are several handy slang words for describing how exactly you are sweating.

For example:

kahi - kainalohiki - armpit sweat

pehi - persehiki - ass sweat

muhi - munahiki - dick sweat (*)

pahi - pallihiki - ball sweat

kovahi - kokovartalohiki - full body sweat

(*) Literally, muna means "egg", but it's a slang word for dick. It makes no sense. I am so sorry.

It would be much more logical if egg would refer to testicles, like it does in other languages (for example German). There must have been a linguistic confusion at some point.

The only explanation I have is that the plural "eggs" (munat) means the male genital area in general, and somehow it then happened that the singular then started to mean the most prominent body part in the area.

The upside is that this provides endless amusement for our weekend breakfasts which often involve eggs in one form or another. Every time we come up with at least 3-5 egg-related statements or jokes. It never gets old.

Entertainment

The only purpose of this post is to route bad puns.

So I got this picture from a German friend of mine. He thought I would find it funny, which I did.

I immediately thought of a colleague of mine who actively reads this blog and who will surely find this funny too. So here you go.

(If you don't speak enough German to understand the "joke", I'm sorry. It's too dry to be explained.)

I'll route here another joke which is funnier but unintentional. During last year's Oktoberfest, the Munich police thanked neighboring countries for collaboration (the last paragraph on the page). Or at least tried to.

"Das Polizeipräsidium München begrüßt die engagierte Unterstützung aus Italien und Frankreich. Polizeivizepräsident Robert Kopp ergänzt dazu: "Diese gemeinsamen Steifen sind ein sichtbares Zeichen einer beispielhaften internationalen polizeilichen Zusammenarbeit. Wir freuen uns, dass wir diese auch heuer in der bewährten Form fortsetzen können.""

"The Munich police headquarters welcome the dedicated support from Italy and France. Police vice president Robert Kopp adds: "These joint patrols boners are a visible sign of exemplary international police collaboration. We're happy that we can continue in this established form this year too.""

Taken into account that most women visiting Oktoberfest wear Dirndls...

... that is somewhat easy to believe.

Not Bad!

German can sometimes be confusing, if you know English.

Do not worry, that is a stop (Not = emergency).

And this is a pretty decent bathroom cleaning product (Bad = bath).

It goes the other way around too. A German friend of mine told that he was confused when working on smashthestack, a war game. Non-geeks, do not worry, you don't need to know what a war game is to find this funny (you only need to like puns, which you do, since you're reading this blog). Anyhow, the game has levels which are labeled like level01, level02, level03 etc. And then there was level03_alt. The German in question told me that first he just disregarded the level, because he thought it's just and old version (alt = old), and only later it occurred to him that this is actually English ("alternative"), not German.

Ümläüts

You all know that rock bands like to insert random umlauts (the little dots) in their names, like Motörhead. But you might not know that a German band, die Ärzte ("doctors") - who have a legitimate Ä in their name - take typographic trolling one step further and write the Ä with three dots instead of two. The fictional band Spinal Tap takes it to the next level and puts the umlauts over the n.

But the rock world still has unused umlaut potential. For example, Janis Joplin could've written her first name as Jänis and at least 5 million people would find it hilarious - namely, jänis means hare in Finnish.

For a long time, I found it so weird that somebody would be called Janis. I only associated it with jänis, and only recently it dawned on me that it might have something to do with Janice.

My surname, Hölttä, has umlauts on its own, too. Both ä and ö are letters in the German alphabet, but still my name gets misspelled a lot in Germany. The most common misspelling is "Höllta", which I object for two reasons. Reason one, it brings the name closer to the German word for hell (Hölle). Reason two, it breaks the vowel harmony. Let me explain...

In Finnish, we have a thing called vowel harmony. It means that a, o, and u cannot occur in the same word as ä, ö and y. E and i can occur with both kinds of vowels. So, if you have used a in the first syllable of a word, there's no way you can use ä, ö or y in the next. Suffixes and such obey the harmony too, for example, "talo + ssa" (in a house) and "metsä + ssä" (in the woods).

Because a colleague of mine, Herr Doktor E., objects this notion, I need to specify that vowel harmony applies to the parts of compound words separately. For example, you can have a word like "herätyskello" (alarm clock) which consists of "herätys" (wake up) and "kello" (clock) and it's harmonic enough for our purposes. I'm not going to tell him that there is one exception to vowel harmony, namely "tällainen", which has probably evolved from "tämän lainen" (literally "this-alike").

The Estonian language is very close to Finnish, but doesn't obey vowel harmony. That's why Estonian sounds funny to us Finns. A bit like Dutch sounds funny to Germans.

Let's backtrack to my surname. It has been unscientifically proven that people whose names are closer to the beginning of the alphabet are more successful in life. And I remember hearing about a tech company where all the interns' surnames started with A...

When I married and took my husband's surname, I took a step in the wrong direction: my maiden name began with "Ha", and "Hö" is slightly worse. But moving to Germany was clearly a wise choice - in Finnish å, ä, and ö are in the end of the alphabet (so we have a, .., z, å, ä, ö), but in Germany ö is next to o.

Å, by the way, is a Swedish letter which denotes a sound that used to be a, but has shifted towards o due to the vowel shift. It is pronounced as o.

I think vowel shift is a great thing. Germans, of course, wanted to be special, so they did a consonant shift instead.

If Germans need to use German in an environment without umlauts, they tend to replace ä with ae and ö with oe. Finns, subjected to the same conditions, just replace ä with a and ö with o. If you want to guess my e-mail address, this is the key to the success. One exception though: the word "näin" means "I met (somebody)" (literally: "I saw") and the word "nain" means "I fucked (somebody)". In that case, clever Finns transform "näin" to "naein". Three consecutive vowels - beautiful!

There is also a slightly artificial Finnish word, "hääyöaie" (hää - yö - aie), which means "wedding night intention". I'm not going to try to use it a sentence.

The vowel boundaries cause confusion between speakers of different languages. The other day, I used the German word "weniger", and I got back a comment that I should say "weniger" and not "wäniger". I sincerely thought I said "weniger", but the boundary between e and ä doesn't lie in the same place in Finnish and in German. If I carefully say e, it will be perceived as e by Germans, but if I'm sloppy, it will be perceived as ä. And when Hungarians say my name, it sounds as if they were saying Moorja instead of Marja.

There is a rumour that Germans cannot distinguish between the Finnish words "herkkä" (sensitive) and "härkä" (bull). You can try it out yourself! (Use the "listen" button.)  And ignore the translation, it is wrong. Correct translation would be "a sensitive bull".

Cousin's godparent's namesake

I mentioned earlier in a comment that Finnish words for relatives are much more complicated than the corresponding English ones. Let me expand that a bit.

I already wrote that we have a different word for uncle, depending on whether he's your mother's brother ("eno") or your father's brother ("setä"). The word for aunt is the same ("täti"), independent of whether she's your mother's or father's sister. You also need to specify whether nieces and nephews are your brother's or sister's kids (they're just called "sister's daughter", "sister's son" etc.) This caused great difficulties when Donald Duck was published in Finnish. Initially, Donald was translated as "setä" (uncle from father's side) of Huey, Dewey and Louie, and they were Donald's "veljenpojat" (nephews from brother's side). But then Don Rosa started publishing the comics expanding the history of the duck family. It turned out that Donald is actually "eno" of Huey, Dewey and Louie, and the translators were in trouble. They decided to keep using "setä" nevertheless. and only use "eno" in the historical comics, where it really matters.

In Swedish, it's important to specify whether your grandfather or grandmother is from the father's side ("farfar" / "farmor") or from your mother's side ("morfar" / "mormor"). English and German don't distinguish between them, and in Finnish we have a set of side-neutral words (which literally mean grandfather / grandmother): "isoisä" and "isoäiti", but we can also specify it if we want to ("isänisä", "isänäiti", "äidinisä", "äidinäiti").

There's an additional Finnish word which is closely associated to the words for relatives, namely "kaima" - somebody who has the same name as you. It's almost like namesake, but namesake - according to Wikipedia - means especially somebody / something that has been named after somebody. "Kaima" doesn't share this meaning - it means especially somebody who has the same name by coincidence.

Instead of godfather and godmother we have god-aunt, "kummitäti", and god-uncle-from-the-father's-side, "kummisetä".

The expression "serkun kummin kaima" (cousin's godparent's namesake) means a distant relative who you feel like you should include in your Christmas card sending list but you don't want to, or a relative who you're not sure how exactly you're related to.

Like in English, we call siblings who only share one parent with you half brothers ("velipuoli") and half sisters ("siskopuoli"). That's logical, since they share half of your blood, in a way. But we also call step parents "half parents": "äitipuoli" (lit. mother half) and "isäpuoli" (lit. father half). That makes no sense.

And to keep up with the "words and expressions they don't teach you in school" undercurrent of this blog, there is a cute almost-relative name in Finnish, which is very hard to translate: napalanko, literally "bellybutton (napa) brother-in-law (lanko)" (or maybe "brother in bellybutton"). It means a person who is two steps away from you in the sexual relation network, and as the name suggests, your "napalanko"s are men who have had sex with the same person as you (before, after or at the same time, doesn't matter). Theoretically, the same term for women would be "napakäly" (bellybutton sister in law) but it's not widely used.

The corresponding German term is much more obscene: der Lochbekannte, literally meaning "hole acquaintance". I don't even dare to think what the female term would be. With the Finnish term, it's obvious that the gender of the person you're talking about matters, that is, you need to refer to him or her as sister in law or brother in law, but in the German world view, it seems that the gender of the pivot person is more important.

I am not aware of the corresponding terms in any other language and googling failed me. Maybe it's better this way. But if this term exists in your mother tongue, or in a language you know, feel free to comment.

Is H a dirty letter?

I was reading a book "Facts and Fallacies of Software Engineering". It said there that the author would've wanted to call the book "Fifty-Five Frequently Forgotten Fundamental Facts and a Few Fallacies", and people would then call it "The F-Book". But the publisher said that F is a dirty letter, and while D and H are also dirty, F is clearly the dirtiest letter of the alphabet and this is unacceptable.

I can understand why F is a dirty letter, and I can also somewhat understand why D is a dirty letter, but I have really hard time coming up with any frequently used dirty words that begin with H. The only ones I can think of are "ho" and "hump", but I think I'm missing something... native speakers (or non-native speakers), please help me out!