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Mythical German fowl. It has the head and foreparts of a duck, and the tail and hindquarters of a duck.

posted at: 17:16 | path: /naturenotes | permanent link to this entry

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Helen-Fielding-the-novelist's collected columns from The Independent appeared in Finnish as Bridget Jones: Elämäni sinkkuna, which I understood to mean "My life as a ham". It sounded unconvincing, but I rationalized it to myself in terms of hams sitting on butchers' shelves looking pinkly available.

Kinkku, however, is the real word for ham. Sinkku I should have recognized as a borrowing from English, meaning either a 45 rpm 7" single, or someone who lives on their own.

posted at: 13:33 | path: /baltism | permanent link to this entry

The more famous son of Kingsley confused me last weekend. I was reading an article about Finnish students in further education (ammattikoululaiset), their likes, dislikes and other people's attitudes towards them.

Despite all of the clues in the article, the box on the facing page labelled Amis-tyyli, quoting as its sources Amis Plaza II and Amis Files, still made me think of The Rachel Papers. My second thought was the German slang for Americans.

I can only blame a heavy cold.

posted at: 12:21 | path: /baltism | permanent link to this entry

Do you make your porridge with milk or water? Do you eat it with salt or sugar? I don't care. I didn't care before, but now I've found a new variable.

I have some packets of Finnish porridge, or as the Swedish text calls it, gröt. It contains dried blueberries. The instructions finish with Nauti maidon tai mehun kanssa. Enjoy with either milk or juice. Juice? The Swedish text confirms this: Ät med mjölk eller saft.

posted at: 12:09 | path: /baltism | permanent link to this entry

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Even though Hölderlin's career ended in the early 1800s, there are very few musical settings of his poems before the late twentieth century. An exception is Brahms's version of Hyperions Schiksaalslied (original spelling) made from the dark-brown stuff he had left over from the German Requiem.

Perhaps it isn't surprising that the first Hölderlin setting in my record collection is by someone as recent as Ligeti; Hölderlin often uses unusual classical metres and takes Pindar as his model. But maybe, Goethe excepted, the best poets don't produce the best lieder. Can, for example, you tell me without looking who wrote the words for Winterreise and Die Schöne Müllerin?

posted at: 21:25 | path: /D/bread_and_wine | permanent link to this entry

You're probably bored of contrasting happy free-range organic pilot whales with debeaked featherless chickens, so here's another one.

Find someone who has just eaten some farmed salmon or trout, and mention the Norwegian lundehund, a dog bred to crawl into the burrows of the (humble) puffin. Faces will drop. How could anyone eat the charming sea parrot? A farmed fish will eat, along with dye, antibiotics, and for all I know, those fancy blue lights the modification community mount underneath their cars, many times its own weight in sand eels. This may be a problem.

It could be that puffins are a more sustainable resource than farmed fish.

posted at: 20:31 | path: /fairislefaeroesseiceland | permanent link to this entry

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His first poems appeared just when the battle between the Phosphorists, Goths and Academists had worn itself out...

in The Oxford Book of Scandinavian Verse, ed. E. Gosse and W. A. Craigie, Oxford, 1925.

No further explanation is given.

posted at: 19:38 | path: /baltism | permanent link to this entry

I've found my Greek metre notes, on only the second time of searching. They fell off the back of a pile of Spanish notes I don't remember making. I ought to have found them dividing bank statements, or wrapping crockery in transit, but Spanish notes will have to do.

The wise kangaroos are a mnemonic for one of the three most common sorts of dochmiac: short-long-long-short-long. The wise kangaroos eschew rubber shoes. Only a mnemonic, though, because quantity in English doesn't matter in the same way as in Greek and the pitch accent in Greek can fall on a short vowel. Compare "thè wíse kángaróos eschéw rúbber shóes".

posted at: 11:24 | path: /D/bread_and_wine | permanent link to this entry

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In Düsseldorf in May I saw a black swan sitting by an unresponsive black bicycle, rubbing its beak against the front wheel and keening.

posted at: 13:36 | path: /naturenotes | permanent link to this entry

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Pitää is a verb with an enormous number of translations into English. Today's senses are pitää elossa and pitää hengissä, which mean to keep alive, transitively. As far as I can tell, they take the accusative. The accusative in Finnish is far too complicated to explain here.

Nouns in the accusative take the form of the nominative, partitive or genitive according to context. Pronouns have a special accusative form ending in -t, so "keeps me alive" is pitää minut elossa. This is an oversimplification.

posted at: 19:55 | path: /baltism/pitaa | permanent link to this entry

Apparently waterfowl like Hobnobs better than mouldy bread or even many other biscuits. Apparently Hobnobs dunk well in tea and don't disintegrate. Apparently swans are what they eat, but until I'd read

Ihr holden Schwäne,
Und trunken von Küssen
Tunkt ihr das Haupt
Ins heilignüchterne Wasser.

I'd never made the connection. Is it fair to test soft and crumbly biscuits on your local mutes and mallards?

posted at: 17:33 | path: /D/bread_and_wine | permanent link to this entry

Everyone knows the stories of the words villain, churl, bad, nice and silly, so I won't bore everyone with them.

A new expression for me today was schlecht und recht, which, an endnote explains, comes from the older sense of the word schlecht as "schlicht", which means "unadorned, simple". Schlecht und recht, according to my Oxford-Dudelsack, is still current. It has a more modern application in mehr schlecht als recht.

posted at: 17:14 | path: /D | permanent link to this entry

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I don't know what the English for this is, but I do know that the gannet, Sula bassana, fouls its nest. One of the most spectacular sights in the Firth of Forth is the gannet colony on the Bass Rock painting the island white every nesting season. Let us imitate this fine bird.

When I was small, I thought gannets were as common as herring gulls or blackbirds everywhere.

posted at: 14:41 | path: /OE | permanent link to this entry

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I have been reminded at least ten times in the last week and a half that I should have read Hölderlin, most recently on the radio in a discussion of translating Jelinek. Hölderlin has also been mentioned in connection with a film, The Ister, which is unlikely to be shown at the Odeon in the town where I live, a review in the TLS of Heidegger's correspondence with Celan, a review in the LRB of translations by Michael Hamburger, who lives on a different Suffolk branch line, and three or four other articles, skimmed, about Heidegger's Hölderlin criticism.

Do you see how ill the Scottish Office through my school education has prepared me for life? According to New Labour, I'm a consumer. Based on my experience of consumption in actual shops and dealing with actual train operating companies, this leads me to expect no comeback but lots of vexatious advertising about how important my custom is.

posted at: 22:54 | path: /D/bread_and_wine | permanent link to this entry

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In OE1's Kulturjournal today, there was an interview in which Dorothee Frank says, of Nobel Prize for Literature winners and their influences on the literary life of their countries (translation mine),

Elfriede Jelinek is the first author originating from Austria. Before her there was only Canetti and he wasn't born in Austria.

I shall dwell on the point at this sad time for the black--brown coalition running Austria. What's relevant is not where Elias Canetti was born, it is the circles he moved in, and where he worked, which was Britain. Austria after 1938, in what the FPÖ, whose official logo is sky blue despite their muddier-coloured politics, probably imagine was its hour of need, was far from congenial for a Sephardic Jewish intellectual.

Your challenge for next week is to find an English translation of a book by Canetti, who is probably only known in the country where he spent most of his life for having had an affair with Iris Murdoch, in a UK bookshop.

An article on the FPÖ website says "One should not forget that Jelinek has been dragging Austria['s name] in the dirt for years", in contrast, we have to assume, to Jörg Haider or Kurt Waldheim. It goes on to mention eminent literary figures who never won the Nobel, two of whom were Robert Musil and Franz Kafka. It's a shame for the FPÖ's line of reasoning that death, which disqualifies you from winning the Nobel, took both of them before their most important works were published. Die Verwirrungen des Zöglings Törleß, which did appear in Musil's lifetime, is a study of the violence inherent in Austrian society, specifically that in military academies, and is naturally far closer to Jelinek's output than anything we've seen from the Freedomites.

posted at: 22:25 | path: /OE | permanent link to this entry

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The Conservatives have been making unfavourable noises about the Human Rights Act, but this merely incorporates provisions that the UK ratified on the 8th of March 1951. Is it possible to repeal the ECHR and remain within the Council of Europe? I don't know. I do know that the only territories in Europe that aren't members are the Vatican City and Belarus. Monaco joined today, you see.

Much of the media and many politicians refuse to distinguish between the Council of Europe and the European Union, giving the impression that the European Court of Human Rights is an institution of the latter. The next time a parliamentary candidate canvasses you, ask them whether they can tell the difference. If they can't, they're too ignorant to be elected. If they won't, they're too mendacious.

posted at: 22:27 | path: /maunderings | permanent link to this entry

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On hearing a trailer for George on George, a programme on Radio 4 where the late George Harrison talked about the less-late George Formby, I couldn't remember which was George Formby, and which was Robbie Williams.

posted at: 21:20 | path: /maunderings | permanent link to this entry

A reader points out that there are conservative, literal Christians who strongly disapprove of Alpha for its attitude towards Roman Catholics (accepting, ecumenical, willing to shake hands) and the Holy Spirit.

posted at: 21:19 | path: /maunderings | permanent link to this entry

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Here's a game all the family, from indie kids to economists, can play.

Take a four-piece rock band with singer, lead guitarist, bass guitarist and drummer. We all know that the drummer may not be the band member who's best at playing drums. Can you demonstrate that the lead guitarist need not be the best guitarist? Can you demonstrate that the best singer and guitarist could end up playing bass and drums respectively?

Aside: does this hold for chamber music? Are violists disguised drummers?

posted at: 21:36 | path: /simulations | permanent link to this entry

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You might despair at the yellow press in the UK constantly digging up the conflict with a long-departed jackbooted junta in Argentina over twenty years ago, or the yet older wars against Germany, which have been dragged for no obvious reason into this article about Kiruna/Giron (Sámi for ptarmigan, as is kiiruna in Finnish), but there are people in Austria who still care about the Ottomans reaching the gates of Vienna three. Hundred. And. Twenty-one. Years. Ago. Not even the most ardent Jacobite goes back quite that far.

But is the opposition of Republican France to Turkey's accession to the EU merely the rage of Caliban seeing his own face in the mirror? Where else in Europe, apart from a few Catholic Länder in Germany, has banned the hijab?

posted at: 22:05 | path: /OE | permanent link to this entry

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The logo for the Alpha course still looks like a man carrying a giant weasel. This is much too difficult for me to interpret.

Much easier, though, is the new advert, which shows a mobile phone displaying a text message reading "is there more to life than this?". Since they're from the conservative, literal wing of the church, the answer has to be "no". There is nothing outside the text, you see.

posted at: 22:11 | path: /maunderings | permanent link to this entry

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Today I went to Tesco, looking for fenugreek. You can't buy fenugreek in the places I normally buy food, and it's vital for cooking kippers. Cook them without fenugreek, and your house will smell of kippers for the next week, no matter how many windows you open or indeed have bored in your walls.

Tesco is as dispiriting as reading The Bookseller, the trade magazine of an industry that, as any trip to a bookshop in the UK will show you, concentrates on interior design and ghostwritten memoirs of celebrities in their twenties. If you see a translation from foreign in a bookshop, it's probably of a detective story. If you see a book in foreign, it's probably a translation of something by J K Rowling. The Bookseller has photos of the people responsible for this enjoying themselves at parties, rather than, say, being dropped out of helicopters over the North Sea.

Never again. I must find out where else I can get fenugreek before today's supply runs out, and I'm starting from a position of complete ignorance. I couldn't tell you whether it was animal, vegetable, mineral, use, ornament, fish or fowl. Since dock leaves often grow conveniently close to nettles, I'll assume that fenugreek is actually a powdered fish that swims with the herring.

posted at: 19:35 | path: /maunderings | permanent link to this entry

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Here's an odd thing: the intended implication of "Can you name ten famous Belgians?" is always one of the supposed shortcomings of a small country with a comic name. But I always hear it as "I'm so incurious, ill-read and uninterested in the visual arts that I don't know the first thing about a country that's closer to London by train than much of England."

If you haven't heard of at least half of the following people:

• René Magritte, painter
• Django Reinhardt, guitarist
• Adolphe Sax, inventor of musical instruments
• Jacques Brel, singer
• Georges Simenon, crime novelist
• King Leopold II, king responsible for millions of deaths in the Belgian Congo
• Marc Dutroux, a somewhat more notorious serial killer these days, but on a scale five or six orders of magnitude smaller
• Hergé (Georges Remi), cartoonist
• Maurice Maeterlinck, poet and playwright
• Jean-Claude Van Damme, actor

then it's your fault. I deliberately haven't listed anyone whose career was before the foundation of Belgium in 1840. What would your list of famous Britons look like if you excluded everyone before the foundation of the UK in 1801 or when it gained its present borders in the 1920s? I deliberately haven't included any present-day politicians or people who are well known in their own field but less so outside it, like Ensor, Horta, Broodthaers, Prigogine, Merckx, Audrey Hepburn, Kim Clijsters, Justine Henin-Hardenne, Jacques Tits (sic), Georges Lemaître, Solvay, Delvaux or Panamarenko.

This reminds me that I haven't been to Belgium since January. I must go again, and soon.

posted at: 13:43 | path: /leplatpays | permanent link to this entry

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The outside back cover of my Penguin Classics Lorca describes the bilingual edition as "drawing on every book of poems published by Lorca and on his uncollected works". I blame the Chapman brothers.

posted at: 22:34 | path: /artism | permanent link to this entry

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You might be tempted, in this season of sunshine and showers, to try to photograph a rainbow. You can't, no matter how long the exposure. To help you think about why this has to be true, bear in mind that the rainbow moves as you do. This is particularly obvious if you're on high ground, and especially when moving in a car.

posted at: 22:32 | path: /aletheia | permanent link to this entry

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Could you stop using the phrase, please?

If you want to use it accurately, then, Celtic only making any sense as a linguistic term, it would refer to the Gaeltachts in Ireland, which are small and widely spread, the Gaidhealtachd in Scotland, which is non-contiguous and well dispersed, and in Wales an area that acts rather like the holes in a sponge cake, except the holes can move around, and presumably grow and shrink as people's commands of Welsh improve and deteriorate. Its overtones are rather too dismissive and pejorative for an idea so ill-thought-out. Can you count all of the space between three speakers of Welsh as part of the Celtic fringe? Does that area diminish to a line if one of them has a stroke?

If you want to follow the usage in newspapers, to mean Scotland, Wales and whatever bits of Ireland the author intends, then you're on a very slidy floor. Bits of Scotland, Orkney for example, have never been provably Celtic. The Highland Line hasn't moved for centuries, and the bulk of the population lives and has lived on the West Germanic side of it. Cornwall kept its own language until after the Reformation. The sense here, of course, isn't linguistic but the sort of racial fiction that's popular with numpties and worse all over the world, especially peculiar, often American, fascists looking for heritage. There is no meaningful genetic distinction between the populations in the different countries of the British Isles.

Scotland, Wales and Ireland are even more Norman inventions than is England.

posted at: 19:28 | path: /maunderings | permanent link to this entry

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Say Ää.
Ää.
Say Öö.
Öö.
Say Üü.
Üü.
Very good.

I'm pretty sure I didn't miss a lesson on umlaut that was any more sophisticated than this in 1988 when I started learning German at school, but I only noticed yesterday that you only see umlauts in stressed syllables. That's sixteen years less a week or so.

I've only just noticed this because the same rule applies in Estonian, in place of vowel harmony. Veps is somewhere in between Estonian and Finnish in this respect, apparently. The vowel õ, which is a sort of schwa (and close to how most English people pronounce ö in German), gets more common the further south you go, and the Livonians can't use it often enough. Is the umlaut-only-in-stressed-syllables rule the result of influence from the Baltic Germans? Somebody must know, somewhere, surely? I'll explain you the Baltic Germans later.

posted at: 21:28 | path: /D | permanent link to this entry

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... means "the preparation for a wedding night", and has an obvious division between ö and a because of vowel harmony. But what about hääyö?

You can't have four vowels in a row. Ouoilla is only attested thirteen times in Google, and most of those are from the Kalevala.

You're supposed not to be allowed three vowels in a row, hence partitives like autoja and lusikoja, explains Daniel Abondolo in the excellent Colloquial Finnish. I don't know how this squares with aie, which finishes with an unwritten glottal stop, though it seems to mostly appear in the plural forms aikeita, aikeissa and aikeista.

Häät is an interesting word. That it comes from the German Hochzeit shows that Finnish is not quite the Jurassic Park amber you assume from seeing words like kaupunki, sinappi and kuningas.

posted at: 22:04 | path: /baltism/greedy | permanent link to this entry

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See Spelling revolt grips German press.

BBC Monitoring writes, of Springer and Spiegel:

The two companies are not the first publishers to abandon the 1996 spelling rules, which included changing the spelling of many compound words and cutting the distinctive "sz" sound represented by a beta character.

Where. Do. I. Start? The new spelling retains ß after a long vowel. It replaces ß with ss after a short vowel. This makes pronouncing German much easier if you're not a native speaker. This makes words with ss conform to the rules of every other double consonant in the language. And ß is certainly not a beta character. β is a beta character. In a seriffed font, ß has serifs, while beta doesn't. There's a descender on beta and not on ß. They are   d i f f e r e n t   l e t t e r s .

posted at: 20:47 | path: /D | permanent link to this entry

Is greedy parsing always the correct strategy when reading Finnish words?

The question first occurred to me in June 2002 on the Suomenlinna ferry: First, is there any point in, when presented with an unfamiliar and very long word, looking up elements that aren't the first first? Second, is the largest chunk at the beginning of a word that could form a word, assuming that the rest of the word can form a word or unit of sense, always a word?

Take tulipaloale, to pick a word at random from my Gummerus. Ignoring the biggest word that is the word itself, the next break is tulipaloa|le, but le, unlike la (as in Tapiola, Pohjola, Kalevala) doesn't make sense on its own. The next break, working back, is tulipalo|ale, which, ale meaning "sale" and being short for alennusmyyntiö, makes a word. The rest of the word breaks into tulipa|lo, again, not allowed, or tuli|palo, which means fire-fire. So, a fire-fire sale.

Pont Lurcock points out that there is a problem with the letter n, which is the genitive marker. Both aula (entrance hall) and naula (nail) (Pont's example) are words, as are ero (difference) and nero (genius). I'm used to ambiguity in English, but Finnish seems such a well-constructed language that the ambiguities are something of a surprise. I've never heard of anyone being brought a plate of liver in a restaurant (Haluaisin maksaa) when they wanted to pay, though.

posted at: 20:47 | path: /baltism/greedy | permanent link to this entry

[image: fearful old man in heavy spectacles looking out from behind curtains]

A THINGOE PENSIONER today celebrates his eighteenth birthday. But how? He was, of course, born on the 29th of February, in 192. This would make him 80 today, you might imagine, but he explains:

"It's all the Germans' fault." he explains. During the Second World War, Churchill removed the leap days from the calendar to help with the war effort. This leaves me two years' short, because I missed birthdays in 1940 and 1944. I spent the entire war only three years old, so I didn't have to to to school!

posted at: 19:15 | path: /maunderings | permanent link to this entry

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The other day, over lunch, I saw a daddy-long-legs caught in a spider's web outside. A wasp came, unpicked the body from the legs, and flew away with it. It was about one-and-a-half times the size of the wasp.

Then the spider appeared at the bottom of the web, climbed up, bundled together the legs and scurried away.

posted at: 22:43 | path: /naturenotes | permanent link to this entry

I often walk past a country-pursuits shop. From the exhibits in the window, I have worked out how to catch a heron for your dinner. Attach a silvery model fish to a flat tweed cap, and hide in a pond, waiting for a heron. When one arrives, and tries to eat your hat, stab it very hard with the samurai sword.

posted at: 22:42 | path: /naturenotes | permanent link to this entry

I saw an otter throwing up. It wasn't very fluid, so it was like pink--brown toothpaste coming out of an enormous furry convulsing tube.

posted at: 22:41 | path: /naturenotes | permanent link to this entry

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You will need a post-it note and one or two fluorescent highlighter pens. The results are very small, and in somewhat peculiar colours. Alternatively, find a south-facing pinboard, preferably a warm red, in a south-facing office, and leave a few large posters on it for a few years. Remove. You might want to leave some of the posters on for twice as long as the others.

posted at: 18:26 | path: /artism | permanent link to this entry

Les Six were composers, and Les Fauves were painters, but this doesn't help me remember which were which.

posted at: 18:26 | path: /artism | permanent link to this entry

... is, with the possible exception of Hungarian, Finnish. Never have I studied so long at a language, peered at the newspapers, listened to the tapes, visited the country, listened to the singing and still understood so little.

I picked up an Albanian news magazine somewhere on the Bakerloo line today, and could at least get the gist, despite never having expended any effort on the language. Most of the political vocabulary, you see, is Latinate.

I have spent a mere week looking at Basque, and that was while I was very busy indeed, and still I can make out more of www.egunkaria.com (2003-04-29: now shut down through the efforts of Judge Garzon) than I can of www.helsinginsanomat.fi. Basque, while related to nothing else at all, at least says ZINEMA and PROTAGONISTAK rather than a calque from Swedish or an incomprehensible neologism. I grant you that the verbal auxiliary is very complicated, but you can take that at your leisure having already understood the verb and the rest of the sentence. It's a relief to come to the end of a paragraph and read "Komedia frantziar dibertigarria da."

Returning to the Bay of Finland, we find the same phenomenon with Estonian. Estonian is much more prone to borrowings, which makes it less forbidding. Unfortunately the formation of the genitive and partitive is much less regular than in Finnish, but Estonians will correct you if you get them wrong, as I discovered when ordering juice at the Open-Air Museum near Tallinn.

posted at: 18:25 | path: /baltism | permanent link to this entry

The kantele, which is a sort of zither, has a glottal stop on the end. You never hear this on the radio. That is mere hair-splitting, though. More egregious is the case of Arvo Pärt.

The standard radio pronunciation of his name is with a voiced v like in English, and the surname as if it were in German, with the smallest suggestion of a guttural r in the middle.

This is only the second case I can think of of this phenomenon. The first involves the former Chilean dictator Pinochet, whose surname in Spanish is said with a t on the end and the ch like in English "church". In the UK, though, (the Americans tend to be better at getting Spanish things right) the name is treated as though it were French. There is no good reason for this, especially since someone who'd never heard the name before might say "Pin-o-chett", which is not too far off the Spanish.

The ä in Estonian is a front "a". It's pronounced like RP "a". Estonian a is more like RP "aw". It's a backal vowel, though they don't have the same rules on vowel harmony as in Finnish. The r is rolled. Once I heard Mark Russell saying "Part" on Radio Three, but he was uncorrected by the producer. I say "uncorrected", but the German pronunciation might be correct in English by now.

posted at: 18:19 | path: /baltism | permanent link to this entry

... in Finnish is, to my delight, pronounced exactly how I pronounce cow in English.

posted at: 18:18 | path: /baltism | permanent link to this entry

... is not a pun on the US intellectual, but a genuine Finlandssvensk singer and bandleader. Didn't qualify for the Eurovision Song Contest, though.

posted at: 17:46 | path: /baltism | permanent link to this entry

(i) The Order of the Elephant is apparently named after the elephant that rose up and trumpeted when he saw Christ on the cross. There isn't much scriptural evidence for this, is there?
(ii) How did one of the King Fredericks contrive to be not only King of the Danes and Norwegians, but also of the Goths and Vandals?
(iii) What are the sphinxes doing supporting the 19th century coffins in Roskilde Cathedral?
(iv )Come to that, why is there Salome on the pillar where Harold Bluetooth is buried? Is it as simple as the connection with John the Baptist's spring halfway down the brae? But why not the saint looking rugged in his fur?

posted at: 17:44 | path: /baltism | permanent link to this entry

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Most of the Highway Code doesn't apply if you're wearing a hat. Be careful.

posted at: 19:32 | path: /aletheia | permanent link to this entry