Confused about nouns

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AldenG
Posts: 3353
Joined: Wed Apr 29, 2009 3:11 am

Re: Confused about nouns

Post by AldenG » Sat Jun 13, 2015 1:07 am

I hereby claim a share of the advance and royalties.

Just offhand, joka lähtöön feels a little newer than 1940s, but he would certainly have been willing to throw it in if it was prevalent already then.


As he persisted, I was obliged to tootle him gently at first and then, seeing no improvement, to trumpet him vigorously with my horn.

Re: Confused about nouns

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Jukka Aho
Posts: 5237
Joined: Fri Apr 06, 2007 1:46 am
Location: Espoo, Finland

Re: Confused about nouns

Post by Jukka Aho » Sat Jun 13, 2015 2:15 pm

AldenG wrote:Who knows how these associations get filed or misfiled where they do, but I think my original feeling that made vähäpätöinen percolate up was a dismissive sort of "trivial; not worth my attention; less important than he/it thinks they are." I guess a good word after deliberation would be "minor" in the sense of "some kind of minor bureaucrat in the Sultan's court" filing papers nobody will ever see again or "a minor god in the Roman pantheon." I could probably have done better at putting that into one English word.

Of course vähäpätöinen may still not be an apt (or contextually compatible) Finnish word for that, either, but that's the direction I was trying to go with it. On reflection, I suppose mitätön would be an improvement? Maybe a bit stronger than I first had in mind, but more contextually congruent?

On edit: "a God of little importance." Suggestions?
Vähäpätöinen is fitting for the pseudo-Sinuhean, dry, observant, narrative register demonstrated by Hank. ;) My point was it sounds a bit stiff for a modern conversation where I imagined myself reacting to some eyebrow-raising tenets held essential by the followers of some supposed god. To discuss "gods of little importance" you would either have to buy the premise of there being a god (or a plurality of them) and accept that they really are actors in this world, or take the scholarly birds-eye view about religions where you take no such stance at all and just compare the degree of influence the various gods or religions exert upon the believers. The sentence used as a starting point in this thread sounds more like a personal reaction to some incident or doctrine where you half believe in the existence of the said god yourself or are at least willing to humor the thought for the sake of argument.
znark


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