Höttöinen pakkaslumi....

[Rob A.]

Here's an exchange from another language forum:

Question:
Höttöinen pakkaslumi. Millaista lunta se on? ...a question asked by a non-native speaker..

Response:
Kevyttä, helposti vaikkapa puhaltamalla paikaltaan lähtevää, ei paikalleen lujasti asettunutta lunta. "Pakkaslumi" tarkoittaa, että lumen sataessa on / on ollut aika paljon pakkasta. Lämpötilan ollessa nollassa tai vain hieman miinuksella saattaa sataa lunta, mutta lumi ei voi olla "höttöistä pakkaslunta".

I would translate this, literally, along the following lines:

" (Fluffy, frozen snow is) ....light, for example, easily blown on ...?? ...from its leaving (place), (it) is not to place firmly positioned snow. "Frozen snow" means that snow in-falling is/has not much freezing. Temperature being zero or only slightly minus to bring snowing, but snow cannot be "fluffy, frozen snow."

A typical English translation might be:

"(Fluffy, dry snow is) ...for example, light, easily blown from the place it fell. (It) is not firmly settled snow. "Dry snow" means that the snow when falling is not well-frozen. The temperature, being at zero or slightly minus, brings snow, but such snow cannot be "flluffy, dry snow".

Still a bit clumsy. but I think that is a close interpretation of the Finnish. I was having trouble with Kevyttä, helposti vaikkapa puhaltamalla paikaltaan lähtevää... this phrase seems to be a series of adjectives and adverbs acting as a subject complement to the understood subject....Höttöinen pakkaslumi. Any comments?? Is there a better way of saying this???

Oh ....and the word, höttöinen..... All I could find was the word, hötö....which apparently is colloquial.... Does this word have other meanings? And is there a better word to describe, "fluffy"?

[AldenG]

Höttöis/tä

Looking at other examples, I read it as loose, flimsy, crumbly (of food). Of snow, I think fluffy is a good translation. That's what I originally got from mere sound and context, and other examples reinforced but also refined that impression.

Kevyttä, helposti vaikkapa puhaltamalla paikaltaan lähtevää...

Kevyt/tä light

helpo/sti paika/lta/an lähte/vä/ä easily leaving its place

vaikka/pa for instance (here with the emphatic -pa, which, which might be rendered in English as a short raspberry or toss of the hands)

puhalta/ma/lla by blowing [on it]

I think perhaps you are about ready to tackle Sinuhe. I was looking at Chapter 1 again last night and at least in that introductory part, there is a lot of repetition and variation that helps to reinforce remembrance of words and phrases. It would give you an opportunity to learn by a combination of analysis and assimilation/association if you were to review your recently read pages often enough. You could use a dictionary, but with all the repetition I think you'd gradually start to absorb vocabulary and structures directly.

Plus it is full of wisdom and wit, both dry and outright sarcastic at times. I know of no book that exceeds it in those respects.

[AldenG]

Vaikkapa always means what I said. It's not literally "for instance" (which would be esimerki/ksi) -- that's just what we say in English in the same context. In a way that I find hard to explain, vaikkapa is a little more open-ended than esimerkiksi. That's why I included the remark about an interrupted raspberry or toss of the hands. While it an be used in a perfectly matter-of-fact way with no theatrics, it can also be accompanied by a light "hell if I know"-grimace or twitch of the eyebrows or something like that.

Vaikka by itself primarily means more like "though, although" but with a lot of variations of application that map to other meanings in English. It's a good example of the special problems of translation and also of the need to reach a point where the words have meaning to you in Finnish, not English.

[jahasjahas]

"Pakkaslumi" tarkoittaa, että lumen sataessa on / on ollut aika paljon pakkasta. Lämpötilan ollessa nollassa tai vain hieman miinuksella saattaa sataa lunta, mutta lumi ei voi olla "höttöistä pakkaslunta".

""Frozen snow" means that snow in-falling is/has not much freezing. Temperature being zero or only slightly minus to bring snowing, but snow cannot be "fluffy, frozen snow."

""Dry snow" means that the snow when falling is not well-frozen. The temperature, being at zero or slightly minus, brings snow, but such snow cannot be "flluffy, dry snow".

"Pakkaslumi" means snow that fell when the temperature was rather cold. Snow can fall when it's zero degrees or a bit under it, but such snow can't be "höttöinen pakkaslumi".

(I misunderstood the answer when I read it the first time. I thought the end meant "snow can never be 'höttöinen pakkaslumi'".)

[Rob A.]

I think perhaps you are about ready to tackle Sinuhe. I was looking at Chapter 1 again last night and at least in that introductory part, there is a lot of repetition and variation that helps to reinforce remembrance of words and phrases. It would give you an opportunity to learn by a combination of analysis and assimilation/association if you were to review your recently read pages often enough. You could use a dictionary, but with all the repetition I think you'd gradually start to absorb vocabulary and structures directly.

Plus it is full of wisdom and wit, both dry and outright sarcastic at times. I know of no book that exceeds it in those respects.

Thanks...and I see it is freely available on the web...though I can't download it at work... "Access Denied"......... I'll look for it tonight....

[AldenG]

Most of the links I saw were for audiobooks. However, I did find a place on a .ru domain that purports to offer PDFs. I looked at one and it seemed mostly reasonable. The first paragraph had a gross scanning error but that may be there to defeat IP content crawlers. I read a few paragraphs here and there without seeing more scanning errors.

I scribbled out a bit of vocabulary for you (about one page's worth, three paragraphs) that you can reportedly download at:

http://www.easy-share.com/1918001931/sinuhe-001.pdf

At first it looks like you have to pay to download, but there is a free option as well.

The error in the first paragraph is where mairitellakseni has been transformed to mairi te liakseni. That does not appear to be characteristic of the document, just an early glitch.

Even as I look at the last page of the book, there is still a lot of simplicity and repetition, in a good way. Especially in Sinuhe, Waltari writes a clean and simple language, even if a bit bookish. Despite the slight bookishness, he is an excellent model for learning good Finnish. Much better than newspapers, and easier to learn from as well. You will quickly come to enjoy Sinuhe as literature. After you've read a quarter or half of Sinuhe (or eventually all of it), I have the impression of you that you'll find it has become much faster and easier to pick up modernisms from the newspapers. It would be difficult to find a better text for learning to read Finnish, what with its clarity and repetition, unless the text were written specifically for that purpose.

What I'd suggest is also getting the English version and sometimes reading a page first in Finnish, then in English; but other times first in English and then in Finnish. A major goal is to make the transition from conscious parsing to unconscious parsing and to minimize the time you have to spend thumbing through a dictionary or glossary. That comes from practice and repetition. That's why reading ahead in English, but not sentence-by-sentence (except when necessary) is a good way to prime yourself to learn words from their context.

[AldenG]

Another thing that none of us has corrected yet: pakkaslumi is not "frozen snow" but "freezing-weather snow." And freezing weather doesn't really mean 0 or -1. It means kunnon pakkanen. You can say Ulkona on viisi pakkasastetta, "it's five degrees of freezing outside," but in the scheme of things, five degrees is just barely pakkasen puolella. (All of which is no doubt a familiar mindset for Canadians -- even Vancouverites.)

Pakkanen / pakkas- refers to "freeze" (n) as an entity in its own right, almost an animate thing at times, which comes and goes, waxes and wanes (pakkanen heltyy, "relents"), and so on. Maa voi olla pakkasen kourassa, with koura being fist or grip. We'd probably say "winter's icy grip" but pakkanen is definitely a separate entity from winter.

[Rob A.]

Most of the links I saw were for audiobooks. However, I did find a place on a .ru domain that purports to offer PDFs. I looked at one and it seemed mostly reasonable. The first paragraph had a gross scanning error but that may be there to defeat IP content crawlers. I read a few paragraphs here and there without seeing more scanning errors.

I scribbled out a bit of vocabulary for you (about one page's worth, three paragraphs) that you can reportedly download at:

http://www.easy-share.com/1917891983/sinuhe-001.pdf

At first it looks like you have to pay to download, but there is a free option as well.

The error in the first paragraph is where mairitellakseni has been transformed to mairi te liakseni. That does not appear to be characteristic of the document, just an early glitch.

Even as I look at the last page of the book, there is still a lot of simplicity and repetition, in a good way. Especially in Sinuhe, Waltari writes a clean and simple language, even if a bit bookish. Despite the slight bookishness, he is an excellent model for learning good Finnish. Much better than newspapers, and easier to learn from as well. You will quickly come to enjoy Sinuhe as literature. After you've read a quarter or half of Sinuhe (or eventually all of it), I have the impression of you that you'll find it has become much faster and easier to pick up modernisms from the newspapers. It would be difficult to find a better text for learning to read Finnish, what with its clarity and repetition, unless the text were written specifically for that purpose.

What I'd suggest is also getting the English version and sometimes reading a page first in Finnish, then in English; but other times first in English and then in Finnish. A major goal is to make the transition from conscious parsing to unconscious parsing and to minimize the time you have to spend thumbing through a dictionary or glossary. That comes from practice and repetition. That's why reading ahead in English, but not sentence-by-sentence (except when necessary) is a good way to prime yourself to learn words from their context.

Well..that was easy... I managed to download a Finnish version, and I found that chapters.ca had one copy in English in Vancouver and that was at their outlet closest to my office...only a few blocks away.. And cheap too, only $18.95...for the original English version translated by Naomi Walford...seems its the 2002 edition....


Minä Sinuhe, Senmutin ja hänen vaimonsa Kipan poika, kirjoitan tämä. En ylistääkseni Kemin maan jumalia, sillä jumaliin olen kyllästynyt. En ylistääkeseni faraoita, sillä heidän tekoihinsa olen kyllästynyt. Vaan itseni tähden minä tämän kirjoitan. En mairitellakseni jumalia, en mairitellakseni kuninkaita, en pelosta enkä tulevaisuuden toivosta. Sillä elämäni aikana olen niin paljon kokenut ja menettänyt, ettei turha pelko minua vaivaa, ja kuolemattomuuden toivoon olen kyllästynyt, niin kuin olen kyllästynyt jumaliin ja kuninkaihin. Vaan itseni tähden minä tämän kirjoitan ja siinä luulen eroavani kaikista kirjoittajista niin memeisyydessä kuin tulevaisuudessa.

Well...a very powerful opener I would say....and I see there are the usual problems with translations from one language to another...it isn't exactly what the original author wrote, though the English version is still rather compelling ...

Here's my attempt... Comments and suggestions are appreciated.....

"I, Sinuhe, son of Senmut and his wife, Kipa, write this. Not in order to praise the gods of the land of Kem, for the gods bore me. Not in order to praise the pharoahs, for their deeds bore me. Only for the sake of myself do I write this. Not in order to flatter the gods; not in order to flatter the kings; not from fear of, nor from hope for the future. For during my life I have experienced and lost so much, that no useless fear bothers me, and hope for immortality bores me, as I am bored with gods and kings. Only for the sake of myself do I write this, and in this I believe I separate myself from all writers, whether past or future."

Well...that was actually fun... And as you suggested, Alden, the repetition helps drive home to word usage and grammatical forms...

[AldenG]

It looks like you fully comprehended it. I'd only make two minor comments.

"I, Sinuhe, son of Senmut and his wife, Kipa, write this. Not in order to praise the gods of the land of Kem, for the gods bore me. Not in order to praise the pharoahs, for their deeds bore me. Only for the sake of myself do I write this. Not in order to flatter the gods; not in order to flatter the kings; (1) not from fear of, nor from hope for the future. For during my life I have experienced and lost so much, that no useless fear bothers me, and hope for immortality bores me, as I am bored with gods and kings. Only for the sake of myself do I write this, and in this I believe I separate myself from all writers, (2) whether past or future."

In (1), it is simply "not from fear" -- of anything, not just the future. (Though I suppose one could argue that fear is always about the future.) Although I find it hard to describe, you will probably get what I mean when I say that tulevaisuuden "carries over" onto toivosta because of their respective cases. But pelosta is not preceded or followed by anything that could bind it to other things in the sentence (other than the kirjoitan in the first sentence that reaches across several intervening sentences and clauses to dictate the elative).

In (2), you may have simply made a stylistic choice, but you did change it to an "or" where Waltari chose an "and" -- "past as well as future."


Then I am curious about whether you typed or cut-and-pasted the Finnish:

Minä Sinuhe, Senmutin ja hänen vaimonsa Kipan poika, kirjoitan tämän. En ylistääkseni Kemin maan jumalia, sillä jumaliin olen kyllästynyt. En ylistääkeseni faraoita, sillä heidän tekoihinsa olen kyllästynyt. Vaan itseni tähden minä tämän kirjoitan. En mairitellakseni jumalia, en mairitellakseni kuninkaita, en pelosta enkä tulevaisuuden toivosta. Sillä elämäni aikana olen niin paljon kokenut ja menettänyt, ettei turha pelko minua vaivaa, ja kuolemattomuuden toivoon olen kyllästynyt, niin kuin olen kyllästynyt jumaliin ja kuninkaihin. Vaan itseni tähden minä tämän kirjoitan ja siinä luulen eroavani kaikista kirjoittajista niin memeisyydessä kuin tulevaisuudessa.

If you didn't drop the "n" and add the "e" in typing, then your copy contains errors mine does not -- and possibly vice versa, though so far I've only noticed the mairi te liakseni that I mentioned earlier, plus some stuff in the ToC.

[AldenG]

Also keep in mind that "separate myself from" is figurative in English (for this text), and "differ from" would more closely match the sense of eroan. Or possibly "distinguish myself from." Of course with a Finnish word that is used for both, it can be hard to divine the inherent sense of a word. But I think when a Finn says eroan, they aren't being figurative -- the word simply means differ as much as it also means separate or resign.

However, I think this is exactly the kind of quibble one does not want to get into when first learning to read the language "in the wild," when absorption and assimilation and flow are the main goals.

[jahasjahas]

If you didn't drop the "n" and add the "e" in typing, then your copy contains errors mine does not -- and possibly vice versa, though so far I've only noticed the mairi te liakseni that I mentioned earlier, plus some stuff in the ToC.

Also "memeisyydessä" should be "menneisyydessä". If they're not typos by Rob, they might be cases of bad OCR (optical character recognition). So many errors in a short passage seems a bit worrying.

I have nothing to add to the translation, except maybe for the use of "bored". I'd say he's "grown weary" or something similar. "Bored" sounds to me like "oh, how awfully boring those gods are".

Should you start a new thread for Sinuhe? Others might be interested too, now or later. I have to confess that the only Waltari novels I have finished are the Komisario Palmu detective stories, which are excellent, but sadly not translated into English.

[AldenG]

I've updated my vocabulary link in the post above after fixing some typos, though Rob's quoted copy of my post still has the old link.

http://www.easy-share.com/1918001931/sinuhe-001.pdf