Medic Alert Card

[johnthetraveller]

I am travelling to Finland shortly. As I have two allergies, I always carry a Medic Alert card in the language of the country to which I am travelling. Normally I try to learn enough of the appropriate language to be able to talk about my allergies, but I am not going to have time before visiting Finland to do this. So that I can travel safely, I wonder if somebody would translate the following text for me to Finnish?

"I am allergic to lactose (dairy products) and to prawns.

I cannot eat or drink anything that contains lactose (milk, butter, cream, cheese, ice cream, most margarines), or prawns.

Please do not serve me anything that contains these ingredients.

If you see me select anything that contains these ingredients please stop me.

Thank you".


I would be very grateful if somebody could take the time to translate that for me please.
Many thanks in advance for any help.

John H.

[Jukka Aho]

"I am allergic to lactose (dairy products) and to prawns.

I cannot eat or drink anything that contains lactose (milk, butter, cream, cheese, ice cream, most margarines), or prawns.

Please do not serve me anything that contains these ingredients.

If you see me select anything that contains these ingredients please stop me.

Thank you".


I would be very grateful if somebody could take the time to translate that for me please.

Olen allerginen laktoosille (maitotuotteille) ja katkaravuille.

En voi syödä enkä juoda mitään, mikä sisältää laktoosia (maitoa, voita, kermaa, juustoa, jäätelöä, useimpia margariineja) tai katkarapuja.

Ethän tarjoa minulle mitään, mikä sisältää näitä raaka-aineita.

Jos näet minun ottavan jotain, joka sisältää näitä raaka-aineita, ole hyvä ja estä minua.

Kiitos.

[johnthetraveller]

Thank you very much for your quick and helpful response.
It is much appreciated.
Thanks again,
John H.

[jahasjahas]

Allergic to lactose (or milk?) or just lactose intolerant? There's quite a nice selection of low lactose and lactose free products if you know the magic words (hyla/vähälaktoosinen and laktoositon respectively). Although I understand that you might want to be extra careful.

[Sami-Is-Boss]

Entirely off-topic, but Jukka Aho, could you give me a quick explanation of why two different words are used here: En voi syödä enkä juoda mitään, mikä sisältää laktoosia

and here:

Jos näet minun ottavan jotain, joka sisältää näitä raaka-aineita, ole hyvä ja estä minua.

Thanks!

edit- I see it's in kielikoulu, not too off-topic then!

[AldenG]

Allergic to lactose (or milk?) or just lactose intolerant? There's quite a nice selection of low lactose and lactose free products if you know the magic words (hyla/vähälaktoosinen and laktoositon respectively). Although I understand that you might want to be extra careful.

Good question.

True allergies (anaphylactic reactions) are caused by proteins. A person who mistakenly thinks lactose is their problem may have a severe reaction to a completely lactose-free meal if the real problem is actually casein, the protein characteristic to milk.

Unfortunately quite a few Americans and Finns alike have been incorrectly informed by their caregivers or by self-diagnosis. There is a clear tendency even in medicine to lump all dairy reactions (except possibly the most life-threatening ones) into "lactose intolerance." If it is nausea or rash or breathing problems or anything other than cramping, the culprit is normally milk protein, not milk sugar.

The 2 reasons this is important are that lactose-free products will not help and that there are half a dozen or more names for processed milk protein

[AldenG]

Of course a person can also have both lactose reactions and casein reactions. But if lactose-free milk or cheese does not help, one had better learn names for casein and how to avoid it.

[jahasjahas]

Entirely off-topic, but Jukka Aho, could you give me a quick explanation of why two different words are used here: En voi syödä enkä juoda mitään, mikä sisältää laktoosia

and here:

Jos näet minun ottavan jotain, joka sisältää näitä raaka-aineita, ole hyvä ja estä minua.

VISK - § 736 Korrelaatin yksilöinti ja muita vaihtelun tekijöitä tells us that joka is used with more specific words, mikä with less specific. So, my interpretation is that "mitään" is less specific, since it can be literally anything, while "jotain" refers to one single thing, even though we don't know what it is.

[Pursuivant]

Are you "allergic to prawns" or "allergic to crustaceans" in general?

[Jukka Aho]

Entirely off-topic, but Jukka Aho, could you give me a quick explanation of why two different words are used here: En voi syödä enkä juoda mitään, mikä sisältää laktoosia

and here:

Jos näet minun ottavan jotain, joka sisältää näitä raaka-aineita, ole hyvä ja estä minua.

Thanks!

edit- I see it's in kielikoulu, not too off-topic then!

Interesting, I didn’t even notice making such choice.

Joka and mikä are both relative pronouns: they begin a relative clause, and relate (point) to something said earlier (called “the correlate” or “the referent”.) Grammar guides appear to agree (click, click) that joka is generally used when referring to nouns mentioned in the preceding clause (including but not limited to nouns which are the proper names of persons or otherwise refer to persons — referring to persons is often incorrectly seen as the only responsibility of joka although it is also used to refer to nouns which are things, objects or animals), whereas mikä can refer to the entire preceding clause, or to an adjective (or a noun phrase containing an adjective) which is in the superlative.

However, mikä is also used when the referent is another pronoun — as long as that pronoun is singular and does not refer to a person (as this would make joka the only suitable choice.)

And, as a special case (we all love those, don’t we?), if the referent is the indefinitive pronoun jokin (of which jota(k)in is the partitive case — see here for more information), both joka and mikä can be used. (I guess this can be explained by the fact there’s also the indefinite pronoun joku [“someone”], which refers to persons but whose grammatical cases are commonly mixed in speech with the grammatical cases of jokin [“something”], which does not refer to persons but things or animals. So the case paradigm for joku vs. jokin is not all that clear-cut a prescriptive grammarian might want to make it out to be, which in turn suitably muddles things up you can treat the word in relative clauses as if it referred to a person and use joka instead of mikä at the beginning of such clause. Or that’s my theory, anyway.)

In the original post, the referents (correlates) were mitään (“anything”) and jota(k)in (“something”). In principle, you could go either way at least with “jotain, joka” / “jotain, mikä”. In practice, I guess there’s just something alluring about alliteration, which explains my “jotain, joka” choice. As for “mitään, mikä” vs. “mitään, joka”, the latter option (which I did not use) might even be a grammatically incorrect choice as that joka does not refer to a person and there does not seem to be a special case in the grammar rules for mitään. It sounds slightly off if given conscious thought but I wouldn’t bat an eyelid if it came up in informal speech.

Google would seem to agree it’s not used nearly as much:

"jotain, joka" (220,000 hits)
"jotain, mikä" (237,000 hits)
"mitään, mikä" (197,000 hits)
"mitään, joka" (51,600 hits)

[AldenG]

Another distinction that some Finns were once taught, though it doesn't do much to describe real-word usage today, is this:

En voi syödä mitään, joka... -- in this one, joka refers to mitään. It's the correct choice for the intended meaning.

En voi syödä mitään, mikä -- in this one, mikä refers to the entire antecedent clause, which states that you can't eat anything (at all).

Using mitä instead of mikä creates an in-between form with more ambiguous meaning and acceptability (by those old rules).

En voi syödä mitään, mikä oleellisesti vaikeuttaa elämääni. (I can't eat anything, which makes my life difficult.) A similarly pedantic distinction in English would be "I can't eat anything that contains milk" versus "I can't eat anything, which makes life difficult." The analogous point of (nowadays bogus) dispute in English would be whether you can can interchange "that" and "which" in the first example: I can't eat anything that contains... versus I can't eat anything which contains (without comma).

Some people love these distinctions but they often live only in the minds of adherents to one school of thought or its antagonists. And the history of a word or distinction is often quite other than imagined. For instance, "impact" -- which many nowadays deplore when it appears as a verb in the oxymoronic creature known as "business English" -- was in fact used as a verb long before it became the noun that many consider today to be its more proper role. I know that I for one was depressed to learn this inconvenient fact.

[johnthetraveller]

Glad to have started off such a lively conversation

In answer to various questions, for me it is (a) a lactose allergy, rather than lactose-intolerance or casein, and (b) prawns rather than crustaceans in general (actually, it seems to be specific prawns, but I don't plan to risk working out which ones they are!).

Thanks again - I'll be printing the Medic Alert card at the weekend,

John H.

[jahasjahas]

I didn't know that was an option, and can't really find any information on lactose allergy. Is that an official diagnosis?

But well, it's not really my problem, is it? Just playing the traditional Finland Forum "dear visitor, you might be WRONG" game. Have a nice trip!

[Pursuivant]

OK, so you got MAITOALLERGIA and no fart-disease.

[cors187]

Another distinction that some Finns were once taught, though it doesn't do much to describe real-word usage today, is this:

En voi syödä mitään, joka... -- in this one, joka refers to mitään. It's the correct choice for the intended meaning.

En voi syödä mitään, mikä -- in this one, mikä refers to the entire antecedent clause, which states that you can't eat anything (at all).

Using mitä instead of mikä creates an in-between form with more ambiguous meaning and acceptability (by those old rules).

En voi syödä mitään, mikä oleellisesti vaikeuttaa elämääni. (I can't eat anything, which makes my life difficult.) A similarly pedantic distinction in English would be "I can't eat anything that contains milk" versus "I can't eat anything, which makes life difficult." The analogous point of (nowadays bogus) dispute in English would be whether you can can interchange "that" and "which" in the first example: I can't eat anything that contains... versus I can't eat anything which contains (without comma).

Some people love these distinctions but they often live only in the minds of adherents to one school of thought or its antagonists. And the history of a word or distinction is often quite other than imagined. For instance, "impact" -- which many nowadays deplore when it appears as a verb in the oxymoronic creature known as "business English" -- was in fact used as a verb long before it became the noun that many consider today to be its more proper role. I know that I for one was depressed to learn this inconvenient fact.

your a real party favorite Alden