varmenne

[Rob A.]

But English is mostly made up of Latin roots (formal) and Germanic roots (informal)... eg 'buy' and 'tell' from Germanic and 'purchase' and 'inform' are from Latin, and he is writing a book so it would be mostly formal English he would be using... I guess he is talking about conversational English, which should be mostly Germanic where possible. By the way I was trying to think of the informal synonym for 'avoid'... what is it.

By the way I am guessing that Anglo Saxon comes from Latin originally as well... OK I just googled and 'rex Anglorum Saxonum' is what Alfred the Great called himself, which sounds quite Latin to me But the term 'Angli Saxones' was used long before to differentiate between Saxons in England and Saxons in continental Europe, I guess that is Germanic... so maybe it is Germanic?! Who knows...

Well...I wondered a bit about that too..."Anglo" doesn't look very "Germanic"....

But I guess the point was about "word origins", and "Anglo" and "Saxon", whether they are in a Latin form or not, would have originated with those Germanic tribes...

But Old English, too, was increasingly influenced by Latin.... I think the Latin alphabet was adopted in about the 7th Century....and the educated people....though there weren't many in that era...used Latin.... About the only Old English I've been exposed to was...probably the same with many of us.... Beowulf, in high school... most of it was a translation ...but a few paragraphs of the original Old English ...in Latin script, were included.... We, of course, stared blankly at this stuff ...

[AldenG]

And just when you think you're getting somewhere with numbers and muffinsit and shortsit and all that stuff, you break for lunch.

And you hear the guy next to you order yhdet ranskalaiset.

See: even Firefox's spell checker is getting its shortsit in a knot about that one.

[Tuonelan Joutsen]

But Old English, too, was increasingly influenced by Latin.... I think the Latin alphabet was adopted in about the 7th Century....and the educated people....though there weren't many in that era...used Latin.... About the only Old English I've been exposed to was...probably the same with many of us.... Beowulf, in high school... most of it was a translation ...but a few paragraphs of the original Old English ...in Latin script, were included.... We, of course, stared blankly at this stuff ...

Plus a lot of learned borrowings into Early Modern English to describe scientific and medical things – they were pretty big on that for a while, so now pretty much everything to do with science in English is of Latin origin…unlike in German, for example, where a lot of words are calques (Säure for "acid", Sauerstoff for "oxygen", Wasserstoff for "hydrogen"…). Which reminds me of this: English minus the non-Germanic words

That stratum obeys English phonology (stress assignment, for one, as well as stuff like trisyllabic shortening), so it's pretty legitimately English. This probably isn't true of all languages with Latin/Greek loan words – in Finnish, words like that sometimes violate stress rules, right? Not to mention including phonemes that don't even exist in native Finnish words?

....and I see, despite the Finnish "shyness" about using articles...you've managed to use two in connection with your use of the Greek loan expression ...."...the hoi polloi" ...which would translate as "the the masses."....in good Anglo-Saxon English...

I know about that debate, and using the definite article was a conscious choice. (As you can see from the above, I subscribe to the school of thought which thinks loans should be assimilated into the language and requiring ordinary language users to know about the grammatical intricacies of the original language where the word comes from is mostly an unworkable idea. When writing in English, I choose the English plural over the Latin plural, too, where applicable: “viruses” instead of “virii”, and “cactus” or “cactuses” rather than “cacti”, for example.

Saying "the hoi polloi", to me, sounds less ungrammatical than it sounds redundant – like "ATM machine" or "Sierra Madre mountains". It definitely sounds less grammatically incorrect, in my opinion, than adding a redundant plural (*"hoi pollois"). (This may vary among speakers: I had an English teacher in middle school who insisted that "phenomena" was actually a singular, and the plural was "phenomenae" or – if you wanted to anglicise it – "phenomenas". ) I wouldn't be surprised if people referred to, say, this Swedish river as "the Magelungsdiket" (but it's not the kind of thing I hear talked about too often, so I wouldn't know ), since the average English speaker probably doesn't know or care about the whole "the North Germanic languages have an enclitic definite article" thing. The enclitic article would probably be even less resistant to an extra English "the" than "hoi" is. (I think that's a definite article, anyway…otherwise it's just a funny coincidence that it ends in -t…)

[Mölkky-Fan]

I wouldn't be surprised if people referred to, say, this Swedish river as "the Magelungsdiket"

The main reason we would not refer to this Swedish ditch as 'the Magelungsdiket' is because we have never heard of it I can guarantee it has never popped into one of my conversations until this morning...

[Tuonelan Joutsen]

Yeah, I just looked on Wikipedia for random Swedish geographical features that ended in -n or -t to make that point, since I'd never heard of any at all…

[AldenG]

Jukka, speaking of borrowing things from other languages, what was your reaction to "teollisuusstandardi" back when it was everywhere in discussions of early PCs?

It really bugged me as a crude and overly literal mistranslation of "industry standard," even though Sweden did the same thing. I mean first of all, standardi wasn't at all a common Finnish word before that, was it? Something relating to "compliance" or "conformance" might have been more apt. But worse than that, to me (and the Finnish Mrs. Alden disagrees) teollisuus always implies something industriaL, and teollisuusstandardi sounds to my admittedly inferior ear more like "the standard for industry." Not THE industry [in question], just industrial applications. At the very least, wouldn't "alan standardi" have been better (and branschstandard in Swedish, FWIW).

As strange as it sounds, in English one does sometimes speak of the "insurance industry," the "candy industry," the "entertainment industry" -- at least in American English, from which "industry standard" arose. It is a distinct and secondary meaning of the word industry that doesn't seem to me to be inherent in "teollisuus." Isn't it true that you would write about selluteollisuus but never about viihdeteollisuus? And about Atk-ala but not about Atk-teollisuus? (So what about IT?)

If you could make everyone do it all over again, now that you have grown thoughtful about your use of loan words and authentic Finnish, what do you think "industry standard" should have become in Finnish?

On the whole I think the IT sector in Finland is quite creative and appropriate about how it brings IT terminology into Finnish with a combination of matter-of-fact translation of some terms, Finnish respelling of other terms to make the original English pronunciation declinable (especially if it's an acronym or invented word to begin with), liberal use of nicknames ("korppu" and a bunch of more recent ones I can't recall just now), and probably some other techniques. I think it's an entirely different situation from what the French or (possibly worse) the French Canadians try to do with IT vocabulary. But on the the granddaddy of all modern IT terms, I suspect Finland got it wrong.

[Jukka Aho]

Jukka, speaking of borrowing things from other languages, what was your reaction to "teollisuusstandardi" back when it was everywhere in discussions of early PCs?

It sure sounded a bit strange, and pretty much for the reason you cite: the word teollisuus brings to mind something like... well, what Google Images returns when you type the word in it. When I first heard the word (or saw it in a magazine), I thought it had something to do with “hardened” or special-purpose computers used on factory floors or in control rooms and other “industrial” settings.

Then again – and even though it might initially sound all wrong – over the time you just usually have to accept the new words; especially if the whole industry [now there’s that word again!] (magazines, marketing, newspapers etc.) starts pushing them. Some time later, when they have established themselves, you tend to think nothing of them; they’ve lost what seemed to be their initial literal meaning and gained their own specialized meaning. And that’s pretty much what happened to teollisuusstandardin mukainen PC, now an obsolete expression if any...

As an aside, I never really accepted the word – or the concept behind it – for other reasons. I was an Amiga user back in the day and propping an inferior platform (which the 286/386 era and earlier PCs running MS-DOS or Windows 3.x truly were, at that time) by pompously calling it “the industry standard” was irritating to say the least. It seemed like some sort of a Wintel marketing trick, aimed at undermining the credibility of the alternative platforms.

I mean first of all, standardi wasn't at all a common Finnish word before that, was it?

It’s hard to say how common it was, but SFS (Suomen Standardisoimisliitto) was founded in 1947 and its predecessor, Suomen Standardisoimislautakunta, already in 1924.

As strange as it sounds, in English one does sometimes speak of the "insurance industry," the "candy industry," the "entertainment industry" -- at least in American English, from which "industry standard" arose. It is a distinct and secondary meaning of the word industry that doesn't seem to me to be inherent in "teollisuus." Isn't it true that you would write about selluteollisuus but never about viihdeteollisuus? And about Atk-ala but not about Atk-teollisuus? (So what about IT?)

Viihdeteollisuus is actually used a lot these days – so much so it doesn’t really sound strange any longer – and no doubt as a direct translation from “the entertainment industry”. But perhaps it could be argued that modern entertainment really is produced in a similar manner to some sort of a sausage factory process...

IT-teollisuus is already used in the magazines but it’s still a bit borderline case. Perhaps it will start sounding fully acceptable in the longer run.

If you could make everyone do it all over again, now that you have grown thoughtful about your use of loan words and authentic Finnish, what do you think "industry standard" should have become in Finnish?

Well, as I said above, I think this marketing term for the Wintel hegemony shouldn’t have existed at all... :D But maybe a fuzzier expression such as yleisesti käytettyjen standardien mukainen would have done. In practice, teollisuusstandardin mukainen and PC-yhteensopiva or PC-klooni (PC meaning the IBM PC, not any other “personal computer”) were synonyms and the latter two were probably used more than the former, in the end.

On the whole I think the IT sector in Finland is quite creative and appropriate about how it brings IT terminology into Finnish with a combination of matter-of-fact translation of some terms, Finnish respelling of other terms to make the original English pronunciation declinable (especially if it's an acronym or invented word to begin with), liberal use of nicknames ("korppu" and a bunch of more recent ones I can't recall just now), and probably some other techniques. I think it's an entirely different situation from what the French or (possibly worse) the French Canadians try to do with IT vocabulary. But on the the granddaddy of all modern IT terms, I suspect Finland got it wrong.

Back when I started, käytettiin diskettejä, printattiin printterillä, klikkailtiin ikoneja, valittiin optio menusta, ajettiin softaa, päivitettiin hardista etc. :) Those English loanwords still live on but maybe primarily in hobbyist/geek lingo now...

[Pursuivant]

"alan standardi" just sounds dubious, as you know what an "alan mies" is...

[AldenG]

Thanks for the thorough-as-always response, Jukka.

Pursuivant, apparently I don't know the meaning you have in mind. In a vanilla context, I would take alan mies to be any kind of expert, professional, or quasi-professional. I'd think it would be more likely to be applied to trades and skills outside medicine, law, and dentristry, for which universally established titles like lääkäri, lakimies/asianajaja, hammaslääkäri spring automatically to a speaker's mind. It sounds like something you'd apply to stuff that ordinary people might do, though not as well or as legally as alan mies. Something you'd apply to an electrician, a person who makes recordings, etc., but probably not to a policeman or a vicar or a bishop. Se kyllä rukoili arkiasioista, mutta suuren hädän tullessa [tultua?] se kääntyi aina alan miehille. Apart from sounding not-quite-native, it probably sounds comically cynical as well.

Since you've clued me in to a special connotation, I suppose my first guess would be gigolo and my next one would be some kind of small-time leg-breaker, arm-twister, street-loan collector or something like that. Or possibly a hit-man, especially since the film "The Professional" probably had a good deal of international success. Or some other kind of clandestine operative?

[Jukka Aho]

Since you've clued me in to a special connotation, I suppose my first guess would be gigolo and my next one would be some kind of small-time leg-breaker, arm-twister, street-loan collector or something like that. Or possibly a hit-man, especially since the film "The Professional" probably had a good deal of international success. Or some other kind of clandestine operative?

Alan mies falls to the same category as alan lehti: if the ala is unspecified and cannot be deduced from the context, it is probably meant as a reference to the the porn industry...

[onkko]

Well as native finn alan mies would be like

[AldenG]

Come quick! There's a bear in the yard!

[AldenG]

Alan mies falls to the same category as alan lehti: if the ala is unspecified and cannot be deduced from the context, it is probably meant as a reference to the the porn industry...

Aha. So I get two terms for the price of one.

[Jukka Aho]

Aha. So I get two terms for the price of one.

And as Onkko notes, alan mies is also used for “professional” drunks and winos who know all the tricks about how to get oneself legless even with cheaper substitutes.

[Tuonelan Joutsen]

Well I know in England, the average English teacher in school could do with a few lessons in English. Phenomenon is of course the singular. Another classic one is criterion/criteria.

Well, I'm from the US, which "boasts" the worst schools in the entire developed world, so this kind of thing is pretty much the norm in my experience.

Other interesting ones are "politics" and "economics": are they singular or plural? Data, agenda etc.

Linguistics…the United States…