Sun, 24 Oct, 2004
Keep alive
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
Ententod, Schwanengesang
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
The Secret Language of Language
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
