Dude is mad [homophobic slur] and [ethnic slur] think his Trump shirt promotes hate

@Alan Robertshaw

I know you didn’t ask me, but I have to admit that I’m not a rally driver. I guess…I guess that I’m a bad Finn. *sobs* 🙁

@Skiriki

Well I live in a small settlement on the South Coast. You may have heard of it, Helsinki? 😀

I hope Central Finland is getting a bit more snow, and in more permanent form, than we are this winter. It’s been a constant relay race between snow and rain these past couple of weeks…

Sorry to derail the thread, but come on, this is pretty much the most Finns in one place on the Internet that I’ve seen. 😀

Nordics (and pseudonordics like Finns) are awesome. It’s no wonder that the cool places on the web would attract them.

I have some friends up in Oulu, if that helps, and a university friend in Tallinn, which isn’t in Finland but I’m told that the locals like to think that it is.

Any of our Finnish friends familiar with the band Sielun Veljet (or L’amourder as they are in the UK)?

Loved that lot.

@Skiriki

Ah well, that’s why we keep the other parts of Finland around, so that we can send our youngsters out there to learn how to be proper Finns in the forests. 😀

It’s too bad that you’re not getting much snow, either. I have to wonder how we’re going to survive now, since we’re not getting toughened up by a proper winter…

@Alan Robertshaw

I really like Sielun Veljet a lot. I used to live quite near to the singer of that band, Ismo Alanko and I’d see him every now and again. Perks of living in a small-ish city in a small country, I guess. 😀

Alan:

Absolutely! *bops Alan with an icicle-magic wand* You’re now a honorary Nordic! Enjoy!

And yes, I know Sielun Veljet, I’m in that age slot where they were a pretty big name in my childhood, and so on. Not a huge fan, though I won’t scream if I somehow end up hearing their music, more like “okay, that was a thing”.

Monzach: Yeah. Maybe we’ll need to build halls with icy, cold conditions where people can wield sticks… wait. We already got those, never mind.

I once thought maybe I would be able to trace my ancestry back to something cool. My grandfather worked his way back to the mid 1700s to some guy who had almost exactly my name and lived pretty much down the street from us. -_-

@Alan, IP, Skiriki et al.

Special thanks for IP for the Swedish language lesson. That was fascinating. I had noticed a news article about the hen debacle but didn’t realize the word was “invented” already in the 60s.

Adding to Skiriki’s excellent explanation on the personal pronouns in Finnish: “se” (=it) is widely used in some dialects to refer to everyone and everything – human beings and inanimate objects alike – to the degree that referring to someone as “hän” (=personal pronoun he/she) will cause people to wonder whether you are subtly insulting the person in question or speaking overly stiltedly for some reason.

In writing, however, referring to someone as “se” in the exact same context would be insulting (unless we are talking about extremely unofficial writing like chat messages or such). You can bet this makes writing dialogue in novels (and translating foreign novels) interesting. To quote a friend studying linguistics: “Spoken and written Finnish are rarely similar but occasionally they do happen to have something in common”.

IP also mentioned impersonal pronouns a few comments back and I started thinking about them. Finnish doesn’t have them at all. We change the ending of the verb and add the object usually in front of the verb.
For example (Swedish offered at the end for IP’s comfort since it also uses a similar system in addition to the impersonal pronouns IP introduced):
Hän soittaa. = He or she calls/will call. (Yes, our present tense also works as our future tense.) = Han eller hon ringer.
Hänelle soitetaan. = He or she is called/will be called. = Han eller hon rings.
By the way, the verb “soittaa” can be translated as “to call” only in the “… by using a phone” sense, not in the “haul your ass here already” sense.

By the way #2, one of the main reasons I comment so rarely is because no one likes random “Well, on the other hand, in LANGUAGE X [insert an off-topic teal deer]” comments…

@Alan, scildfreja, SFHC

Wait, is Bronto back or not back?

I still remember the moment when I was in a museum and a lady working there told me that triceratops may not have existed. To exaggerate: something in me died that day :’C

@Alan Robertshaw

I’ll just have to come over to Britain, and take your jobs and your women, then. 😀 Massive sarcasm tags, naturally.

Yikes, everyone and their aunt commented while I was writing my teal deer

::embarrassed::

@ monzach

Well you’ll have to ask the women yourself of course, but come on over. The more the merrier. (For old times sake, sneak in via Lindisfarne)

Monzach:
*ksnrk* My gran was from Northern Savonia, and I’ve spent my summers and winters there, with her brothers, their wives and farms. I can speak that fiendish dialect at will. 😀

I also know how to detect and dodge a falling cow patty when you’re roughly two and half feet tall and helping to clean a cow shed, and there’s always that one cow who times her poops for that.

Kind of semi-useless now, now that I’m 5’6″ and spending my time in cities.

But, time to scamper. Getting late, I’m old and creaky, and headache has faded mostly away. Hyvvee öit vaa kaikille.

Hang on, Finnish has dialects? I didn’t think there were enough of you to have dialects. That would be like, say, us Afrikaners having dialects.

Which we do, so that’s a bad example, I suppose.