Linguaphile wrote:Why so much Swedish? (I mean, I know why people in Finland would know some Swedish. But it surprises me that it would be used in place of Estonian, when Finnish and Estonian are so similar and Swedish is so different by comparison.)
We talked about this and we thought that it's maybe because we've learnt to associate "
I can't remember any words!" with Swedish, so when we're trying to speak Estonian, our brains go like "oh yes I recognise this situation, here, have some Swedish words! : )" What's even more funny: this doesn't happen in Swedish lessons. That's when everyone suddenly remembers English, Russian and German words. Especially German. Our Swedish teacher in high school even gave us a 15-minute speech of "this word is German, this is Swedish, this is German, this is Swedish, please don't mix these up in your matriculation exam".
But don't worry, we also mix Estonian and Finnish and the worst thing is that it's much more difficult to notice than Estonian and Swedish. Like this one girl who said that she'd been sick and so she had spent the previous day by resting and
parandama herself and the teacher was just like
Since this is a cognate thread:
parandama to fix, repair, improve
parantaa to heal, improve
That's funny! So, it's like
menneen Nokian Lumia then.
And what do you do with them? They don't melt away.
No, it's
menneen talven Lumia (Lumia of previous winter).
You know it was a good joke when someone even named
his MA thesis after that.
Your post inspired me to look up
the meaning of Nokia in Finnish and it seems that it is either the plural of a rarely-used (?) word
noki 'soot' or archaic word
nois 'marten'.
Noki means 'soot' and it's not rare.
nokia is the plural partitive, and (surprise!) that's not rare either. Maybe they meant that you don't need the plural partitive of 'soot' very often? In any case, I doubt anyone would've named a city after plural partitive of soot. It sounds kinda... random.
Finnish Wikipedia explains that it could be named after sable (which archaic name is "soot-marten") or beaver (because some people say there weren't any sables in Finland when the city was named). Another explanation is that the word meant any animal with black/dark fur. It also says there that
nokia is a common word in names of bodies of water, which is why some people think it might've meant 'place where fur animals nest'.
What is funny (or sad
) is that more than once I've been asked (or heard people ask) "so if Nokia is a Finnish company, then why does it have a Japanese-sounding name?"
They know things and you've been very close to discovering the truth, too.Back to "cognates and semantic shifts":
aivo mind, brain (but
not spirit)
*
aivot, it's always plural. I've never heard it used for 'mind'. Where did you get this translation?
This is definitely my favourite one.
Linguaphile wrote:hallitus mold
hallitus government
What's the differenceLinguaphile wrote: pulmad wedding(s)
pulmat problems, puzzles
There's
one song that I've loved ever since I heard it for the first time as a child. One line of the song is "
ei, tää pulma on vasta" - and every time I hear this part, I automatically translate it as "no, this is truly a wedding".
It quite ruins the feeling because the song is actually about a mythological (near-)immortal creature
tonttu wondering what happens when you die.
In case you're interested, here's the Finnish and English lyrics. And an instrumental version because I absolutely love the melody.Linguaphile wrote: koristama to clean, tidy up
koristella to decorate
There's also
koristaa, which is even closer to koristama than what koristella is.
(It also means 'to decorate'.)