Vowel Fest

As a finnophile, I often find myself surfing the Web for information about Finland or the Finnish language.

What I find generally veers between the sublime and the ridiculous. If I am honest, it is more often ridiculous than sublime, as regular readers of this blog will no doubt testify. But it keeps me amused, so I keep surfing.

Show Me the Way to a Place with a Very Long Name

The Finnish language has long words. Yeah, we know that. Indeed I have mentioned this many times before in this very blog, including here, here and here.

But what hadn't occurred to me until very recently is what a challenge it might be for road-signs.

Running Around Aimlessly

This week, a particular viral picture caught my attention. The reason it caught my attention is because it provides a perfect illustration of why Finnish is such a tricky language.

In other words, this single picture is a neat summary of this whole blog, no less.

Enthusiastic Bull or the Art of Finnish Palindromes

This week, I found out that, according to the Guinness Book of Records, the Finnish language holds the world record for the longest palindromic word in "every day use" with "saippuakivikauppias" (19 letters). That magnificent specimen of a word means a "dealer in caustic soda", which does beg the question as to how much daily use that word actually gets. But hey, if Guinness says it is in daily use, then it must be.

YetMoreGiantWordFormations

A Finnish colleague of mine went on an English copywriting course in London a couple of weeks ago. Upon her return, she told me that she had been advised that to write good business English copy for an international audience, sentences should not contain words of over 3 syllables.

The thought immediately sprung to my mind that this would be impossible in her native language!

Yes folks, it's time for me to have another dig at the ridiculous length of Finnish words...

Sick Cucumbers

This weekend, I learnt a couple of things about Finnish illnesses, which made me smile.

MoreGiantWordFormations

As if Finnish words were not long enough as it is, Finns have developed endless strategies to pad them out. Chief amongst these are those related to cases which apply to the end of noun and adjectives, and can give you up to a 4-letter bonus! Woohoo!

Giantwordformations

No home should be without a “kolmivaihevaihtovirtakilowattituntimittari”. Obviously.

More to the point though, what an impressive word! At 42 letters, that word makes “supercalifragilisticexpialidocious” look positively puny!