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09.11.2010 00:00
Kolumni
Finnish words are really Killing Me
Mary Nurminen
Kirjoittajan kolumnit
I arrive at work one day and say to my colleagues, OK, please translate something for me into Finnish: "She is one of the wisest people I know."
They ask why I needed a translation, was I writing something important? I say no, I just was thinking about it all the way to work and still am not sure I have it right.
Fortunately for me, my colleagues are used to my weird thought processes so didn't comment on the idea of spending a whole half hour of your morning pondering such things, but simply gave me a couple of translations:
Hän on viisaimpia tuntemistani ihmisistä. Hän on yksi viisaimmista tuntemistani ihmisistä.
They asked what I had come up with. I told them how my thought process went: "Hän on viisa ...i... mpia tunte... ma ...(no it's plural!) mIsta ... NI ihmisistä". And even then I was unsure about if that ni went on to the right word.
3 days later I'm in a meeting with a couple of other people and suddenly they notice I've quit talking and I'm busy writing something in my notebook.
They wonder what it is I'm writing so I show them:
jomman kumman niistä pitäisi
Which is something I had fumbled and finally got out 2 minutes earlier. I told them I'm having problems with exactly this kind of thing in Finnish so wanted to write it down.
"What? You mean jompi kumpi is a difficult word?"
"No, no problem with that. It's that thing where there are several nouns in a row and some require endings but you have to put the endings on the right ones, which is already hard enough, but then you also have to do that on the fly while you're talking."
So I had started with "jompi kumpi niistä pit... (no wait) ...jom..MAN kumMAN niistä pitäisi" You get going, then realize that the verb you want to use would require an ending for the noun before it, which unfortunately you have not put on it. So you have to fumble around and repeat part of it in the right form to say what you want to say.
It's exhausting, I tell you.
And that brings me to The Big Question of The Year: do Finns actually do that - do they really have a whole sentence planned out before they start saying it? Is that the answer to why Finns are more silent than others - they simply have to plan every little thing they are going to say?
I ask another colleague. She says yeah, she supposes they think it through ahead of time. I say wow, we don't always do that in English. We just spit things out as they come to mind.
"You said it, not me," was her dry answer.
But it still bugs me. Do Finns think faster than speakers of simpler noun-verb-object languages? That would mean Germans, with their wacko verb-at-the-end thing, would also be fast thinkers, right?
The next week I'm teaching a course for a bunch of technical writers - real language people - so I ask them about it and tell them the jompi kumpi example. And finally one of them gives me an answer that makes sense:
"We natives could easily end up in that same situation where we've already said 'jompi kumpi' then realized it won't work with the rest of the sentence. The difference is that we can figure out a strategy to change the end of the sentence and get ourselves out of trouble, and as natives we can do that more quickly than you can."
I can accept the quick strategizing part (after all you're the ones with this language which forces you to learn that), but it's just very nice to hear that Finns can get themselves into trouble with this language too.
Vocabulary: Ponder: pohtia, Fumble: haparoida, On the fly: samalla kuin.
