Alinomaa

[AldenG]

Why does alinomaa mean what it does? I can't see any reasonable way to split it other than alin/omaa but I don't get it.

[Pursuivant]

Hmmm.. "alin" is probably from the same stem as "alati"... like in alituiseen.... omaa then again is... hmmm... nimenomaan alinomaa good question. I can't get by with "just is" can I?

Nimenomaan is a good one too - my rude mate always starts yeasaying in meetings: nimenomaan.... nimenomaan... then he sighs... ime omaa...

[sammy]

No idea! This is why I'd love to have a proper etymological dictionary... alinomaa, alituiseen, alvariinsa... difficult to say. The origin of words is often equally obscured to us native speakers

Maybe it means the "land of Alinos" - whoever they are (Alino-maa)

Btw, alinen was literally the underworld, the Finnish equivalent of Hades. But I don't think there's any connection as such, just mentioning this out of interest.

Anyway this is one of those words one alinomaan encounters misspelt with an "n" at the end.

[kalmisto]

"Alinomaa" is an anagram of "anomalia" :
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/anomalia

[kalmisto]

Why does alinomaa mean what it does? I can't see any reasonable way to split it other than alin/omaa but I don't get it.

I do not think that you should split it at all. The word "alin" ( when it is not part of a longer word ) means "lowest" and "oma" means "of one´s own" but those words are not really in "alinomaa". It just looks as if they were there.

kuppi kuumaa kahvia = a cup of hot coffee

kuu = moon
maa = earth

moon + earth = hot

The English word "malediction" means "a curse". If you try to understand that word by splitting it to "male" and "diction" it does not make any kind of sense.

I think that "alinomaa" is similar to "malediction" in that aspect.

[Mölkky-Fan]

Why does alinomaa mean what it does? I can't see any reasonable way to split it other than alin/omaa but I don't get it.

I do not think that you should split it at all. The word "alin" ( when it is not part of a longer word ) means "lowest" and "oma" means "of one´s own" but those words are not really in "alinomaa". It just looks as if they were there.

kuppi kuumaa kahvia = a cup of hot coffee

kuu = moon
maa = earth

kuu + maa = hot

The English word "malediction" means "a curse". If you try to understand that word by splitting it to "male" and "diction" it does not make any kind of sense.

I think that "alinomaa" is similar to "malediction" in that aspect.

The words 'male' + 'dick' were added together in England in the 10th century to give a word meaning 'splendid life-giving thing' , the suffix -tion was in the late 12th century used to indicate the opposite meaning, so therefore maledick-tion was coined in 1197 to mean the opposite of 'splendid life-giving thing' thus meaning a 'pretty rubbish, deathly thing' or in modern words a 'curse'. The 'k' in the middle was lost in 1913 due to a trade name dispute with Kellogg concerning their Special K brand.

[AldenG]

Maybe it means the "land of Alinos" - whoever they are (Alino-maa)

It's funny you should suggest that.

The question arose exactly because I wrote a short little program to take the mirror-sorted Kotus sanalista I posted the other day and use "/" to mark the last word boundary in compound words. The intent was to see what the results looked like, maybe refine the decision rules a bit, and then come up with subsequent steps to mark the earlier boundaries in the words.

Of course it can't do all words correctly and I didn't expect it to. Remarkably, though, with the decision rules I set up, it did perform correctly much more than 95% of the time. At least that is so in the first 10,000 I've reviewed and corrected. (When the list is mirror-sorted and right-justified, the work is not quite as overwhelming as it might sound at first.)

One of the first mis-marks I encountered was exactly alino/maa. There were two other words in these first 10,000 that completely perplexed me and wouldn't come up in Google, either, but I can't remember what they were. On my second and more meticulous correction-pass, probably later this autumn, I'll check such cases in a real dictionary.

[AldenG]

I do not think that you should split it at all. The word "alin" ( when it is not part of a longer word ) means "lowest" and "oma" means "of one´s own" but those words are not really in "alinomaa". It just looks as if they were there.

kuppi kuumaa kahvia = a cup of hot coffee

kuu = moon
maa = earth

moon + earth = hot

The English word "malediction" means "a curse". If you try to understand that word by splitting it to "male" and "diction" it does not make any kind of sense.

I think that "alinomaa" is similar to "malediction" in that aspect.

And I actually considered the option of not splitting it. To take up where I left off in my reply to sammy, I'm running into such doubts more often than you might at first imagine. That's one reason I'm doing a quick inspection run first, so I can isolate issues and come up with consistent criteria and differentiators to apply across the board.

With alinomaa, the comparison to nimenomaan (I did at least get that far on my own) led me to realize the two apparent functional components are not a late-night mirage and the word does need to be marked. At one point I was toying with the possibility of using "." for some types of boundaries and "/" for actual word boundaries, but that is a remarkably slippery slope, so I am going back to "/" for all.

One has to remember that the components of compound words are not always full words, yet still operate as separate functional items contributing independent and modular bits to the overall meaning.

Malediction turns out to be a good example. If you didn't know English or Latin, it could be confusing to recognize the pieces and the boundary between them. But particularly in a mirror-sorted list, you immediately see the similarities in malediction and benediction and contradiction and interdiction and it's obvious there are two functional components at work, each contributing part of the meaning. Finnish has lots of words that are close analogies, just more often with non-Latinate components.

Of course you were being facetious with kuumaa, yet I've encountered words (sorry, don't remember which ones) where I really do sit for a moment and wonder if marking within the prefix is like breaking kuumaa into kuu and maa.

So within prefixes I mark functional units. So far I have not done that in the final unit, as in words like ortopedia, since pedia is not a finnish word. If there were a word uusortopedia, I would mark it as uus/ortopedia and I would mark tukikudosortopedia as tuki/kudos/ortopedia.

Further opinions and suggestions are welcome.

[AldenG]

I do think there should be some kind of prize for fictional etymology, maybe a mini-Finlandia?

So Mölkky-Fan is an obvious candidate for the 2011 prize for malediction, with kalmisto a runner up for kuu/maa.

Then again, what floodgates will this be opening?

[Jukka Aho]

Why does alinomaa mean what it does? I can't see any reasonable way to split it other than alin/omaa but I don't get it.

According to this article, Agricola used the synonymous Old Finnish word alanomati. Still, no explanation of the etymology.

[AldenG]

Here is a range of cases for testing one's notion that it's obvious how the task should be done:

kuutamo
kuusanka
maailma
vatupassi
yhteiskunta
päiväkotipaikka

About kuusanka, I cannot figure out whether the bird is named after kuu+sanka or is named to sound like a word in for instance Russian. Mrs A said "I know it's a word but I don't know what it means." And I asked how she knew that. And she said it was in a song, kuusanka vei... Or maybe I heard wrong on the cell phone driving with the window down, because Kuukkeli doesn't seem to know such a song -- even though kuukkeli is itself the more standard name for kuusanka.

(Now a word like Kuusankka might be a place named for the time a hunter got 6 ducks with one load of birdshot... And before anyone nags about partitive, let me point out Viiskulma.)

Under one set of rules the program wants to split kuusanka, especially since it is the first word after sanka; under another set it doesn't. But that's actually irrelevant because the final decision has to be human.

I find it personally hard to break apart a word as old and basic and unitary as maailma, though it is exactly the compound formation it appears to be and is officially treated as such. And so I split it. You can't start making distinctions about how unitary a word has become. That way lies chaos at least, if not outright madness.

Vatupassi is interesting because although it does come from two words, you don't gain any insight into that by splitting it in Finnish. If someone goes looking for the pieces, the chances of getting insight are only diminished. I don't split on from line in online/järjestelmä or split any other English words in similar hybrids.

While there is no ambiguity about marking päiväkotipaikka, it is tempting to consider a marking system that would distinguish between päiväkoti+paikka and päivä+kotipaikka. But I decided not to get into that.

[AldenG]

Turns out she fell victim to a mondegreen.

The song actually goes:

1. Männikkö metsät ja rantojen raidat,

laaksojen liepeillä koivikkohaat,

ah,polut korpia kiertävät kaidat,

kukkivat kummut ja mansikkamaat!

Keitele vehmas ja Päijänne jylhä,

kirkkaus Keuruun ja Kuuhankaveen,

vuorien, huippujen kauneus ylhä,

ah kotiseutua muistoineen!

...and Kuuhankavesi is a lake.

[Pursuivant]

The proverbial fire department's horse must then be responsible for Orivesi...