Summing
up 2017
I
wrote ten blogs during the year 2017. Three of them in March, and
three in October. In February, April, November and December I only
wrote one blog. All blogs but two I wrote in Finnish; one of the
English blogs is a summing up of the blogs I made in 2016, and the
other is the
poem "When
I Was One-and-Twenty" by A.E. Housman. My blogs of 2017 got 540
page views from the visitors. The
most popular one was "Pysäytä Aurora 17" (Stop the
military manoeuvre Aurora 17), that is, a military event carried out
in Sweden from week 37 until week 39. This blog got 242 page views.
The second most viewed blog was "Pois tieltä risut ja
männynkävyt" (Out of my way twigs and pine cones), which
picked 151 page views.
Those who visited my blogs in
2017 were almost exclusively persons who are natives of some of the
non-Romanic European countries or U.S.-Americans. I got delighted,
when I saw that Ukrainians and at times Russians so diligently read
my blogs. As I mentioned above, I mainly use Finnish in my blogs. It
is because it is the language I know best.
As a matter of fact, I prefer
Esperanto to English as a world language, but the number of people
who know Esperanto is, regrettably, much smaller than the number of
those, who have a command of English.
Blog
1 "Kuulumisia
Chilestä"
(News from Chile). 22.3.2017 / March 22, 2017. Page views: 25. I went
to Chile with my son Illimar to celebrate my sister Liisa Flora, who
lives there and who turned 70 on Feb. 28. We and four of our closest
relatives stayed there for two weeks.
What is Chile like? A
dissenting opinion
In the blog, I first let Mr.
Olli Herrala from Finland describe his summer holiday in the country.
He makes political points that I do not share but think that they
should be heeded. "Audiatur et altera pars" (Let the other
party also be heard) is a good old principle. He says that the free
market economy based on the economic doctrines of Milton Friedman and
put into effect by Augusto Pinochet, the one-time dictator of Chile,
has brought wealth and well-being to Chileans instead of the
communist misery of the 70's.
Herrala admits that there is still
poverty in Chile, but accusing capitalism or colonialism for it is a
cheap pretext. I disagree. Of course, it is free market economy or
"capitalism" that has created the enormous gap between the
haves and have nots in Chile as well as in many other places. This
issue we could discuss much longer, but let's go on.
My personal impressions of
Chile and Chileans
There were many things I got
fond of in Chile. I was touched by Chileans' use of colours. It was
much more varied than the use of colours in Finland or Sweden.
Chileans are easy to talk with, although the only language they seem
to know is Spanish (and in certain regions of the country,
Mapudungu). In Santiago, there are rich districts and poor ones,
that is, barrios bajos. There were a lot of fine cars on the streets,
whereas buses were for the most part less modern and full of people. The subways, on the other hand, were modern, and while often very crowded, they were running to the timetable,
The food was fairly expensive,
which surprised me. Obviously, Chile is not a low-cost developing
country. I enjoyed climbing up hills of Santiago, even if I got
quite exhausted of it. It was very warm, and Illimar had more energy
than I did; he was the one who led us up the hills. From their tops
we had fantastic views over the city. Often there was smog, because
the city is surrounded by high mountains except for the Pacific
Ocean.
We celebrated my sister Liisa
Flora or Fluu both between us, the close relatives, and with Fluu's
Chilean friends. The highpoint was the fiesta at her home. Many
interesting people came there; we had good food, and atmosphere
was warm and homely. Maija, my eldest sister who has studied Spanish,
gave a speech to Fluu in Spanish, and so did even I, who has not
studied Spanish. Luckily, I have a colleague who knows the language,
and I delivered a speech that she had translated from the Swedish
original into Spanish.
One of the guests came to me afterwards and
said that if he could speak Finnish as well as I could speak Spanish,
he would be called a native speaker. Chileans seem to be polite
people. In honour of the day, we who had come from Europe sang
"Gracias a la vida" in Spanish and in Finnish to Fluu. She
loves that song, and so do we.
We visited Valparaiso, saw the
magnificent Ocean (but did not swim there) and then we went to Isla
Negra to see Pablo Neruda's home, which is now a museum. The
Nobel-poet may end this brief report of mine:
Cuándo de Chile
Oh Chile, largo pétalo
de
mar y vino y nieve,
ay cuándo
ay cuándo y cuándo
ay
cuándo
me encontraré contigo,
enrollarás tu cinta
de
espuma blanca y negra en mi cintura,
desencadenaré mi
poesía
sobre tu territorio.
Chile,
part of the modern world
My Chile-blog ends with the
article written by Maria Kuchen. She assaults the market liberalism,
and the inequality it has created. Who has the political and
economic power, and who possesses the means to use them. Her
criticism applies to Chile, and we may be certain that the enormous
gap there is between the very rich and the poor majority that I
mentioned above will not disappear, not even diminish, not in Chile,
not anywhere else either.
Blog
2. "Pysäytä
Aurora 17"
(Stop the military manoeuvre Aurora 17). 23.3.2017. Page views: 242.
This blog is a description of
the big military manoeuvre arranged in Sweden in the autumn 2017.
About 20 000 people took part in it; they were not only military but
even authority persons from various civil service institutes and
departments. Apart from Swedish participants there were military
units from other Western countries such as Finland, France, Norway,
and the U.S..
The blog draws on the
information material I had got from a Swedish peace organization. We
thought that the manoeuvre should have been stopped, since its target
was Russia pictured as the main enemy of Sweden and other Western
countries. This attitude does not reduce but increases the prevailing
tension between the countries in the Baltic Sea region. Moreover,
the tension has grown as a consequence of the arms buildup not only
in Russia and the States but also in smaller countries like Sweden.
Saying this I do not mean to support Russia's occupation of Krim and
its participation in the low level war raging in the Eastern parts of
Ukraina.
Blog
3. "Kansalaisten
sielu ja yhteiskunnan muuttaminen".
I
translated Paul Logat Loeb's
text
"Soul of a Citizen: Living With Connection in challenging
times", and placed it in my blogs. Published: 31.3.2017. Page
views: 30. The blog is published with the consent of its writer. It
concerns an excerpt from Loeb's book with the same title. The book
has sold over 165 000 exemplars and it is said to be a classic guide
as regards engagement in the social change movement.
I
translated the excerpt, because I wanted to learn, how
anti-capitalist movements are doing in the U.S., which is the
scientific, economic, military and cultural superpower of our time.
The relations between people
are at issue in the beginning of the article. Loeb says that
"increasingly, a wall separates each of us from the world
outside", and he asks "How can we renew the public
participation that's the very soul of democratic citizenship?"
Loeb maintains that "certainly we need to decide for ourselves
whether particular causes are wise or foolish. But we also need to
believe that our individual involvement is worthwhile."
The article gives good
arguments to anyone who is burning to make the world around us a
better place to live. Loeb provides his readers with apposite
examples. He points out that the practical situation is of great
importance in social activism. Rosa Parks who wouldn't go to the
back of the bus set in motion a yearlong bus boycott in Montgomery.
Loeb puts forth that "Depicting Parks as a lone pioneer
reinforces the romantic but ultimately false myth that anyone who
takes a committed public stand has to be a larger-than-life
figure..."
Briefly put, if the world is to be changed, we must
do it together, realizing that we all are persons of imperfect
character. As Loeb states:"Imperfection may not be saintly, but
wielding it in the service of justice is a virtue."
Blog
4. "Pois
tieltä risut ja männynkävyt"
(Out of my way twigs and pine cones). Published: 14.4.2017. Page
views: 151.
One of the most unforgettable experiences that I had in
my childhood was when I had a role in a play written by the
Fenno-Swedish writer Zachris Topelius (1818 - 1898). The play is
included in a book with the title "Lukemisia lapsille, osa 6"
(Reader for children, part 6).
The play is about the dispute between
the North Wind and the Sun in regard to which one of them was the
stronger. In one version of the play, the challenge was to make a
passing traveler remove his cloak. The Sun won the dispute, because
the traveler was over-come with its heat and forced to take his cloak
off. In Topelius' version the traveler is an old woman, and the
adversaries keep pressing her to remove her fur coat. Finally, the
Sun gets the best of it.
The play has a long history. I
was told that it was included in Aesop's (ca. 620 – 564 BCE)
Fables, and it also appears in Jean de Fontaine's (1621 – 1695)
Fables under the title "Phébus et Borée" (the gods of the
Sun and the North, respectively).
I did not start thinking of the
dispute only because of literary reasons, but also because of the
practical reason that I had to put books in order on shelves in my
parents-in-law's house. I was glad to find the reader of Topelius,
since it made me think of the role I had in the play – I was the
ill-tempered North Wind – and of the dispute itself between the
North Wind and the warm-hearted (or "heat-hearted"?) Sun. I
was so sorry for the awkward situation the old woman had got into
because of the North Wind. Luckily, the Sun managed to break through
the North Wind's gloomy clouds, and made the traveler's day.
Blog
5. "Keinosanat,
kirousko?"
(Artificial words, a curse?). Published: 18.10. 2017. Page views: 20.
The blog discusses neologisms in Finnish, and I wrote it, because I
happened to read an article by professor Matti Klinge, a well-known
Finnish historian. He criticizes Finnish linguists, who have been
eager to develop the Finnish language by inventing new words. This
has been one of their important tasks and duties since the early 19th
century
Finland became a grand duchy
ruled by the Russian Czar as its Grand Duke in 1809. This era of Finland's
history lasted from 1809 until 1917. The Finnish language was not an
official language in the beginning of this period; it didn't get that
status until the year 1863, when the Czar Alexander II issued the
law that prescribed that Finnish is an official language in the grand
duchy beside the Swedish language.
Developing
the Finnish language was a demanding task, since its vocabulary
lacked words for modern administration, legislation, education, etc.
Matti Klinge describes, how the Finnish linguists carried out this
task:"They took a vernacular word, added derivational endings to
them, and accomplished a lexical creation, which they declared
corresponded to a certain word in another language, best of all, a
principal European language. In this way, they had made up a Finnish
word, which in spite of its vernacular form had a European meaning."
An example of the above is the word "puhelin" 'telephone', which was
created in the year 1897. It replaced the word "telehvooni"
'telephone', which some speakers of Finnish had borrowed from
Swedish, where the word is "telefon". "Puhelin"
combines the verb "puhel-" (stem) 'keep talking' and the
derivation-al ending "-in" 'tool; instrument'.
Klinge would like the Finnish
standard language draw on the lexical sources of the main European
languages. However, confronting Finnish words with words of other
European languages such as Swedish, German and English gives a false
picture of how things really are. The fact is that both Finnish
vernaculars or dialects and the Finnish standard language have lots
of lone words. They have been integrated into Finnish and its related
languages in the course of hundreds of years – in some cases, back
thousands of years ago.
First
loans Finnish and its cognate languages took from the
Proto-Indo-European language, then from Baltic languages, various
Germanic dialects, Russian and its varieties, from old and modern
varieties of Swedish, from Latin, French, Arabic and lately
especially from English. Approximately 30% of the Finnish vocabulary
consists of loans, some of which are very old such as "orpo",
which is "orphan" in English and probably derives from the
Proto-Indo-European word *orbho- 'bereft of father.
Note that loan translations are not included in the above-mentioned
loans. For instance, the Swedish word "träd-gård" lit.
"tree-yard", in English "garden", is "puu-tarha" in Finnish, which is
an exact loan translation from Swedish.
The Institute for the languages
of Finland functions as the centre that takes care of Finnish and
other domestic languages of the country. Of course, languages change
constantly and in many different ways. It is utterly important that
the expressive power of the Finnish language will be preserved.
Finnish linguists and other people to whom language matters should
not repel foreign influence but welcome it, especially if it brings
with it that the language becomes semantically ever more variegated.
We may keep in mind, however, that in the first place, language is
not only vocabulary; I think that the Finnish writer Lauri Viita
(1916–1965) ex-pressed the gist of the matter best of all when he
said that "language is not a mere store of words but the
instrument of expressing one's feelings and thoughts".
Blog
6. "Isoisä,
rotuhygieenikkoko?"
(Was
my granfather a eugenicist?). Published: 22.10.2017. Page views: 22.
I met an old friend in a party last summer and got quite surprised,
when he gave me a book. Its title was very special "Kansankodin
pimeämpi puoli" (The darker side of the People's home (Swedish:
folkhemmet)). Well, I guess that my friend gave me the book, because
it tells critical things about one of my two home-lands, Sweden.
The
author of the book is culture anthropologist Tapio Tamminen. In the
book, he deals with the period, when eugenics was a popular subject
of scientific research and social policy in Sweden, that is, from the
19th
century until the latter part of the 20th
century.
Tamminen mentions my
grandfather Väinö Voionmaa (1869– 1947), when he discusses the
scientific status of eugenics. Here, we need some background
information. It is important to acknowledge that many highly regarded
persons such as John Maynard Keynes, Winston Churchill, and Woodrow
Wilson supported eugenics as did many scientists. Eugenics was a
widely accepted idea both among right-wing and among left-wing
politicians. And my grandfather belonged to them who supported
eugenics. He was one of the leading socialdemocrats in Finland before
World War 2, a professor in history at the Helsinki university, very
active in the adult education movement, and a keen advocate of
temperance.
Tamminen does not take notice
of my grandfather's political, educational and scientific work as
such but says that he without a qualification supported "the
creation of a new human being". In the blog, I argue that being
a devoted advocate of temperance my grandfather acted against
prevalence of alcoholism and deadly violence that were burning issues
in Finland in the 20s and 30s. Like the majority of the Finnish
parliament and as a member of the parliament, my grandfather seconded
the law of sterili-zation, which was enacted in 1935.
Eugenics
was a humanely wrong idea, it was not a right answer
to counter and cure the concrete social problems of crimi-nality,
misery of all kinds and alcoholism. Unfortunately, eugenic measures
did not disappear after World War 2, but in one shape or another they
were practised in Finland as well as in Sweden a long time after the
war. In Finland, from 1935 until 1970, more than 7500 persons were
sterilized for eugenic reasons, and over 3000 on the basis of social
reasons. The major part of the sterilized persons were women, some of
whom were single parents with small children. After 1970,
sterilization has been possible in Finland only at the request of the
person concerned.
My grandfather thought
positively about eugenics, but that was not something he actively
advocated. His main interest was, apart from his scientific
interests, to promote public education (Swedish: folkbildning) and
civilized conditions of living for everyone. In this connection, we
have to keep in mind that the calamities of the Finnish Civil War in
the spring1918 were in fresh memory of the Finnish people. Before
World War 2, Finland was developing a functioning democracy but the
social and political tensions between winners and losers of the war
were still big and deep.
Blog
7. "Jippii
– valloitamme maailman"
(Yippee
– we'll conquer the world). Published: 26.11.2017. Page views: 19.
I was sitting on a sofa at my parents-in-law's living room in
Helsinki watching the Finnish TV, and happened to see a song concert
in a church. The title of the concert was "Ristin maa" or
"The Land of the Cross". A choir consisting of young
children, girls and boys, stood in the front of the altar singing
Christian songs, and a group standing beside the church benches was
pantomiming the choir's songs. The children of the choir were dressed
in yellow short-sleeved shirts decorated with the picture of the
globe and the word "Jippii" / Yippee / in red letters. The
pantomiming group had blue shirts on them.
The concert was well performed,
a real show. It declared the message that was easy to get:"Yippee,
we shall conquer the world with our good Christian tidings", or
with the words of one of the songs:"The country of the Cross
rings the glory of the God." I realized that it concerned a
large Christian revival movement, where adults take care of the
organization and children are the messengers.
While
watching the concert, I came to think of three things. First, this
"Yippee" movement makes effectfull use of modern
communication techniques. Secondly, it continues the long tradition
of revivalist movements; nowadays there are many similar revivalist
groups in Finland. The Yippee-movement has really had air under its
wings. Moreover, it has been successfull in spreading its message to
other countries such as Estonia and Russia.
Thirdly, I kept thinking
of this movement in its historic context. Historical data indicate
that a crusade called "Children's Crusade" probably took
place in the year 1212. Yippee-movement has points in common with this
medieval crusade, when it
engages children to spread the Christian tidings. (See https://en.Wikipedia.org/wiki/Children%27s_Crusade.)
The Yippee-movement and its
activists will most certainly encounter people who do not share their
Christian ideology. Undeniably, the Christian music is often
enjoyable and mentally nourishing. However, the music itself and
well-performed concerts do not give us God, who could save the world
and solve the huge problems that haunt the humanity at the very
moment. For a better world we need human beings who are ready to act
together whatever religion or political doctrine they happen to have
or believe in.
Blog
8. "Kielellistä
ticitystä"
(Linguistic ticing). Published: 16.12.2017. Page views: 10.
There are
people who cannot but do the same things over and over again. This
irresistible need to repeat can be physical, and then it is called
"tic", but I am fairly certain that it can also be mental.
I came to think of my compulsive need to speak about language in all
kinds of situations. I call it "my linguistic tic". To be more precise,
I have been eager to compare languages relative to the length of
their words and sentences. If you wonder why, I have only one good
answer: It is because I have thought that the best language of them
all is Finnish, my mother tongue.
After
a while, to defend Finnish did not go too well. Then, I gradually
understood that there were natural explanations, why Finnish words
were quite often quite long. One of the reasons is the fact that in
Finnish, there are less sounds (i.e. phonemes) than e.g. in Swedish.
In Finnish, there are 8 vowels and 13 consonants, that is, 21
phonemes all together.
In Swedish, on the other hand, there are 9 vowels (without quantity)
and 18 consonants, that is, 27 phonemes put together.
Secondly,
there are restrictions as regards how the phonemes combine. In
Finnish, words typically begin with one or two vowels but just one
consonant; in the end of the words there are almost never two or more
consonants. The phonematic differences between Finnish and Swedish
are visible in words that Finnish has borrowed from Swedish. An
example: the Swedish word "frakt" 'freight' appears as
"rahti" in Finnish. We notice that two initial consonants
/fr/
of Swedish have lost /f/, and that in the end of the word Finnish has
the vowel /i/ and Swedish two consonants /kt/.
A
third major reason why Finnish words are at times so long is due to
the fact that there are lots of endings.
The phrase "I
wonder if I should write (a story)" can be translated into
Finnish with one long word; here the stem has been underlined:"kirjoi-tta-isi-n-ko-han (tarinan). Fourthly, and fairly close to how things are in Swedish, it is easy to make compounds in Finnish. They are handy, but at times very long formations. In the lexicon of modern standard Finnish som 40% of the entries are compounds. To take an example:"collection of manuscripts" translates as one compound "käsi-kirjoitus-kokoelma" (lit. hand-writing-collection).
In
the blog, I ask whether it takes a longer time to put one's thoughts
into words in Finnish than what it takes in English, where words are
shorter. There is some linguistic research
on this problem. In one study, seven languages were compared with
respect to whether it took equally long time to read a given text in
them. There were 59 readers, and the researchers calculated what the
information density was per syllable in each word. E.g. "give",
pronounced as [gɪv],
is a dense syllable because it carries information, while "mul"
of "multi" [mʌl-ti]
is not a dense syllable.
To
make a long story short, the result of the study was that in the
main, in all these languages concerned one could convey the same
amount of information within an equally long time. The syllables of
Spanish were less dense than English syllables, and consequently,
when people speak Spanish, it may often sound faster than English,
because a Spanish speaker puts more syllables in his expressions than
a speaker of English does to convey the same meaning.
Compared with other languages
such as Swedish and English, it may be that it does not take longer
to utter a given thought in Finnish, but still, it may also be the
case that we express our ideas in relation to a given object or
phenomenon in different ways. If this is the case, comparing
languages with one another becomes a more difficult task. In the
blog, I compare the gospel translations of Finnish, Swedish and
English. I come to the conclusion that they differ in their ways of
dealing with one and the same event.
I
made the comparative exercise in the following way: I took a passage
from the book of Luke chapter 2, verse 1. There we can read the
following sentence in English:"And
it came to pass in those days, that there went out a decree from
Caesar Augustus that all the world
should be taxed."
If
we only look at the passage "there
went out a decree from Caesar Augustus", we
find that the Finnish translation follows it extremely well:"...
keisari
Augustukselta kävi käsky..." (lit.
"from Caesar Augustus went command/decree"). In the Swedish
example, however, we have the following passage:"[Vid
den tiden] utfärdade kejsar August en förordning" (lit."[At
that time] promulgated Caesar Augustus a decree". Both in
English and in Finnish the subject of the phrase is "decree",
which is given by the Caesar. In Swedish, on the other, the subject
is "August", who gave the decree.
The difference between English
and Finnish on the one hand and Swedish on the other is very small
but not insignificant, since it concerns the perspective from which a
given phenomenon or event is looked at. In English and Finnish, the
emphasis is on "decree", while in Swedish it is on
"August".
Differences
of expression in different languages is a fascinating object to
study, and there are a plethora of examples of them. For example, in
English "we miss
the train
",
whereas in Finnish "we "late-ourselves" from-train"
("myöhästymme junasta"). 'To be late' or 'to come too
late' is "myöhästyä" in Finnish; it is based on the word
"myöhä" 'late'.
There is one more interesting difference
in these examples, which is that in English "miss the train" is
a verb phrase, where "train" is an object. In Finnish, on
the other hand, the verb phrase "myöhästymme junasta",
contains the word "junasta" 'from-train', which is not an
object but an adverbial. "Myöhästymme" is not a
transitive verb like "miss" but an intransitive verb. So,
these languages express one and the same event quite differently.
I conclude the blog by noting
that my "linguistic tic" has taken me quite far from the
defensive reaction on behalf of my first language Finnish. I have
understood that languages are different not only in terms of phonetic
features, phonemes, syllables, lexical units and syntactic
constructions but also in terms of semantic and cultural contents they
give us means to think and talk about.
Learning a language we do not
only learn to say what we think and feel but we also come to realize
how endlessly multifaceted the world is when looked through the lens
of languages. Languages are gifts we should lovingly and attentively
take a good care of.
Footnotes
