#10 A shore under influence
Each time you open the historiography of ancient Rome, you expect to find bread and circuses, laurel wreaths, seven hills, emperors, conspiracies, phalanxes, legions of maniples, aqueducts, volcanic eruptions, Virgil, and defensive walls beyond which the darkness of barbarian lands stretches. Focalization is internal, to borrow from narratologists: literature on ancient Rome immerses you in all things inside. Surrounded by patricians in togas, amid the steam of thermal baths, giving the thumbs-up to finish off the gladiator. Fluent in Latin! This congruence between the central interest and the focal point of the narrative is less obvious than it might seem.
For historians can choose to sketch their subject either by hatching the interior or by smoothing the outline. Finnish, with its six (present day) locative cases, knows a thing about spatial precision. Two times three. Three for motion: to, from or in (at) the place. Two for the distinction that interests us: between the space, the fruit full of flesh, the sea filled with creatures, currents, and splashes; and the surface, the skin, the threshold, the frontier one brushes against and that resists.
The ancient Roman world is quite a piece of history, a world as solid as a rock throughout the centuries, from which influence spreads far and wide. The Baltic world, conversely, is a world on the fringes, a barbaric world.
Thus, it is through its surface, a porous and ever-changing one, that it is evoked in Matti Klinge’s concise and gripping book, Itämeren Maailma. (Klinge, 2007) It appears as an archipelago of transit lands, at the crossroads of worlds whose boundaries are constantly being redrawn, and each chapter uncovers, in a lively style, a new episode in the conquests and ambitions that come ashore, the ambitions of others, of other worlds centered elsewhere. As its significance crystallizes and its organization takes shape, the center is multiple, ever-shifting. And yet it remains a Baltic world under influence.
Such a training ground is perfect for learning Finnish like a machine: the prose is limpid. History is somewhat known in advance. Helsingborg and Helsingør face each other across the Øresund strait, Charlemagne is enthroned emperor in 800, the Hanseatic League trades in herring. It’s like fitting mathematical splines between fixed points on the otherwise free wave of a curve. Facts are holms in plain sight in a sea of mysteries, rivets that anchor in spots the flow to be deciphered to its meaning.
A barbaric world.
Välimeren alue oli pitkään Eurooppa, “tunnettu maailma”; maanosan pohjoispuoli on koko historiallisen ajan määritelty suhteessa keskukseen, ja etenkin itse se on määritellyt itsensä tässä suhteessa. Siinä Itämeren maailma ei syvällisesti eroa muusta Alppien pohjoispuolisesta Euroopasta, nimenomaan Saksasta, jonka omakuvaan ovat pitkään (ja aikojen kuluessa vaihdellen) kuuluneet perifeerisyys, metsäisyys, vuorisuus, barbaarisuuskin.
Here is what Claude suggests
The Mediterranean region was long Europe, the “known world”; the northern part of the continent has throughout all of historical time been defined in relation to the centre, and above all it has itself defined itself in this relation. In this the Baltic world does not fundamentally differ from the rest of Europe north of the Alps, specifically from Germany, whose self-image has long included (and in varying degrees over time) peripherality, forestedness, mountainousness, even barbarousness.
Are we content with this first try of theirs? Let’s try and match the original to the suggested translation.
Välimeren alue oli pitkään Eurooppa, “tunnettu maailma”; …
The Mediterranean region was long Europe, the “known world”; …
Proper nouns are obvious. Väli- is mid-, middle-, inter- just like Med- in Mediterranean. Medius-terra, middle-land. Middle-land? Isn’t it supposed to be a gigantic body of water? Väli-meren, just like the German Mittelmeer, tells middle-sea: sea in the middle of the land (of Earth, back then). The Latin mediterrāneus is inland, far inside a body of land and remote from the coast: Mare Mediterraneum is the inland sea, in the middle of the world of yore, demarcated by the Atlantic in the West, the barbaric confines in the North and the East.
Välimeren alue oli pitkään Eurooppa, “tunnettu maailma”; …
The Mediterranean region was long Europe, the “known world”; …
Clearly, what long Europe could be is hard to picture, so long gets immediately routed to an adverbial interpretation. Pitkään is the adverbial crystallization, the lexicalization of the illative of pitkä, long. So, literally, *into the long: for long, at length.
Välimeren alue oli pitkään Eurooppa, “tunnettu maailma”; …
The Mediterranean region was long Europe, the “known world”; …
Välimeren alue oli pitkään Eurooppa, “tunnettu maailma”; …
The Mediterranean region was long Europe, the “known world”; …
Albeit grammatical, the English sentence doesn’t really land. Naturally, we can guess the intent: a double identity, the “known world” was Europe was the Mediterranean region. Claude’s is clearly a word by word translation. If you read it raw, it invites perplexity: what do you mean by was Europe? A fortiori, it fails to capture unequivocally the original (which is from a reputable piece and most likely sound, whose aim we roughly intuit, while we are too novice to make definitive claims regarding the Finnish logic at play and the resulting connotation). Let’s straighten out the translation. The exercise partakes admirably in our regimen: instead of just getting exposed, we’ll build a pair of syntactic and semantic counterparts. We must beforehand pay our tribute to (or finger) our preferred Cambridge Grammar of the English Language. (Huddleston, 2002, p.266-272)
English does prescribe word order. While you might say that the sky is cloudy, you will refrain from the reverse: *cloudy is the sky. It might escape in a flight of lyricism, and be very well understood, but it doesn’t abide by the casual way prose gets parsed: usually, you look up at the sky, you see white sheep, and you ascribe to it its property, that of being cloudy. From a fairly traditional perspective, the sky is the subject and all that follows the predicate that gives it shape and texture. Besides its ascriptive use and reading, the linking verb to be might specify a variable: that variable is most of the time the grammatical subject of which the predicative complement fixes the value.
The vital sinew of war (variable) was Øresund strait (value).
Strikingly, the specifying construction allows for smoother reversibility, and
Øresund strait was the vital sinew of war.
reads in a quite synonymous way. Nevertheless, a reformulation into a it-cleft clause unveils that the symmetry is not complete: such a transform works only with identity (not property ascription) and in the order: it is [value] that is [variable].
It was Øresund strait that was the vital sinew of war.
is all fine, but things get sour with
*It was the vital sinew of war that was Øresund strait.
What’s wrong exactly? Specification wants a variable that is open (in search of erudite terminology we faced profusion, so that’s eventually our interpretation and coinage) and definite. A gap must await completion, a wh- question must be possible, that gets resolved with a natural answer. Moreover, the definiteness of the variable instills a meaning of exhaustiveness. What was the vital sinew of war? Øresund strait, and nothing else. While definite, Øresund strait is saturated: the object it refers to and its sense conflate. What was Øresund strait? Øresund strait. Or you’d ask: with respect to what? It might have been the vital sinew of war, but it has been much more: a heavily trafficked waterway, the narrowest channel between Sweden and Denmark, perhaps a sea urchin nest, etc. And the failed it-cleft-clause transformation attempt is where the misuse shows.
Eventually, we are able to pinpoint the troublemaker in
… the Mediterranean region was Europe, the “known world”; …
As innocuous as it might seem, it’s the linking verb, was (and the kind of construction it sparks). We try and rephrase. It-cleft clause.
It was Europe that was the Mediterranean region.
The semantics squeaks. Europe. The Mediterranean region. Mentally, the maps just mismatch. Asking: what was the Mediterranean region? is close to being in vain. A full conceptual fringe clings to the notion, and you don’t know where to start.
At a loquacious stretch, we come up with
For a long time, what was thought of as Europe was nothing beyond the Mediterranean region.
The valuable question is obviously not what Europe, or the Mediterranean region, were identical to, but what they meant, historically, to people inhabiting those times. That’s where the English predicative fails, it seems, to convey the Finnish nuance we try to grasp: probably something along
For a long time, Europe meant the Mediterranean region.
Complications evaporate, our reading gets endorsed, English and Finnish syntax get closer if the clause gets rid of Europe altogether:
For a long time, the “known world” was the Mediterranean region.
(and Europe is just what that “known world” was called). Now it clicks. What was their perceptual map by then? Mediterranean world at the center; anything beyond, Germanic, foreign, barbarous.
Can we infer anything regarding the Finnish logic? At least, we have a presentiment: in a Finnish predicative clause, openness and definiteness are no requisite properties of variables, at least not as much as in English. Maybe the roles of variable and value are more fluid. Finnish has a relaxed approach to word order. There are tacit rules, intuitive laws of emphasis, clarity, and style, which precisely explore the possibilities allowed by such suppleness. Yet, subject-verb-complement order, in the English fashion, predominates, in particular when several constituents rival for the subject function, as it the case here, välimeren alue and Eurooppa being both in the nominative. Assuming välimeren alue parses naturally as the grammatical subject, it’s not the best bet for the predication’s variable: things to the right of the verb, “tunnettu maailma”, the “known world”, work better: what was the known world? Europe, the Mediterranean world.
With that, we feel Finnish thinks differently: evidence is thin, we can’t claim to know much more, but, little by little, we get exposed.
By dint of learning Finnish like a machine, you’ll reach the stage of decent translation reviewer. There’s a whole world between the latter and the competent translator. But that’s an interesting spot to be in: your instincts are enough to arouse suspicion. Reviewing then naturally invites itself into the drill: paying attention to sense and phrasing builds the future productive fluidity. (Just like slow, eccentric pull-ups prelude future excellence: muscles build contractile power precisely as they go through the complementary motion, as they expand.) Translation is a subjective art. That’s why it’s less about correcting than staying on alert, listening for accuracy, batting an eye when the parallel threads make a discord.
But do we really need that much trawling through syntax minutiae and grammar jargon? English grammar into the bargain. The answer is no. Grammar has no primacy in our ascesis. But it surely gives us a hand. Naturally, the bare inoculation of grammar rules the school way is radically antithetical to our principles. We are all about subliminal inference of language patterns through massive exposure to bilingual textual data. Syntax and grammar are no sciences to be inculcated, but living phenomena whose behavior, through kilometric practice, becomes second nature; you grow accustomed to their flow, just as you do to a style. Now, if you have innate English (or your language of excellence’s) grammar, if it’s ingrained in you to the point it mechanically produces and parses with steadfast accuracy, you have a clear edge. Universal grammar or not, there are undeniable constants in manners, structure, and forms across languages, if only because the human conceptual and experiential field, emergent from raw species physiology, is finite and, ultimately, homogeneous. In mastering the motifs of a primal language, the general mechanics running beneath massive multilingual reading is already well-oiled for detection. And how can you get there without true innateness and without begging the question? Well, primal grammar mastery is quite a mystery. Maybe you learnt it very young, the school way. Or a massive teenage reading of the classics like a machine instilled it in you in silence.
Your inference engine is a hypotheses-generating machine. In extirpating the phenomenon from the verbal flow, looking it in the face, you pin its presumption into solid fact. It’s where afternoon grammar strolls really come into their own. Awareness sharpens attention, it affirms our inferential power: next time we’ll meet the same, we’ll instantly know. The grammar textbook, after all, is nothing but others’, the grammarians’, pretense to a fixed, finished artifact of their own inferential effort. Through massive reading, grammatical dexterity magically emerges. Subliminally, rules crystallize. By proofing the grammar once in a while, that crystallization and that emergence get fast-tracked. Conscious grammar is a useful shortcut for humans, who never reach statistical volumes sufficient to infer a language in full.
After so much hard work, let’s read on in a more relaxed manner. Europe was the Mediterranean region, for
… maanosan pohjoispuoli on koko historiallisen ajan määritelty suhteessa keskukseen, ja etenkin itse se on määritellyt itsensä tässä suhteessa.
… the northern part of the continent has throughout all of historical time been defined in relation to the centre, and above all it has itself defined itself in this relation.
In our reading mind, it might go something like this
… maanosan pohjoispuoli… maa… country, land… maan-osan… part of land, well, a continent… pohjois-… everything north… puoli… everyting half… or part, something unfinished in any case… the northern part …
Now … koko historiallisen ajan… koko… all… aja-… time … No, that’s really easy.
… on määritelty… määrä-… the quantity, the definite amount… has been defined (that’s past passive participle, yes, grammar does helps)… suhteessa keskukseen… suht-… everything relation… inessive for the space we are in… in relation, relation to what? keskukseen… keskus-… center… illative for the space we come into… literally *in the relation into the center.
In what follows, similarly, English and Finnish order are congruent for the most part, which makes things simpler.
Siinä Itämeren maailma ei syvällisesti eroa muusta Alppien pohjoispuolisesta Euroopasta, …
In this the Baltic world does not fundamentally differ from the rest of Europe north of the Alps, …
Siinä… in this… Itämeren maailma… the Baltic world… ei syvällisesti eroa… syvällisesti… adverbial of manner, fundamentally (syv- for everything deep)… muusta Euroopasta… from the rest of Europe… not all of Europe but just Alppien pohjoispuolisesta Euroopasta… from Europe north of the Alps.
You don’t have an English adjective for north of something. In Finnish, they do. Maybe that’s precision, one thing to say, one word ready for it, and a war-word factory that can shoot in all conceptual directions.
… muusta Alppien pohjoispuolisesta Euroopasta …
literally breaks down into
… from other / of the Alps / on the northern / Europe …
Muu, elative muusta, is an indefinite pronoun, the rest of. They have a word for that too. The Baltic world does not fundamentally differ from the rest of Europe north of the Alps,
… nimenomaan Saksasta, …
… specifically from Germany, …
… jonka omakuvaan ovat pitkään kuuluneet… jonka… relative pronoun in the genitive whose… omakuvaan… kuva-… image… oma… own… so self-image… pitkään once again!.. for a long time… ovat kuuluneet… kuulua, to hear or to belong… so, have included …
A sudden chill ripples down our spines. We trail another reptile slithering ahead of us.
Kuulua is to hear, but also to belong. German hören is to hear, but its derivate gehören is to belong, or also, to be proper (wie es sich gehört → as is right and proper) and ought to be (er gehört an den Galgen → he belongs on the gallows). French écouter, to listen, comes from Latin auscultō, to listen, but also to believe and to obey. Many of its modern descendants still have the obey color, for example, Catalan escoltar, Italian ascoltare, Walloon schoûter. English be-long itself is difficult to trace, yet likely related to German belangen, to concern, to touch a matter or Dutch belang, interest, concern, all ultimately from a reconstructed Proto-Germanic *langōną, to desire, to long for. To yearn for so much that one reaches, touches: the prefix be- (Proto-Germanic *bi-) is by, near, at. German gelangen (prefix ge- for the verb describing the thing done) is to reach, to get to. So, to belong, to concern, to touch a matter, to pertain to it or come along with it. Suitability (Latin sequor, to follow), properness are nearby. Old English hīeran is first and foremost to obey, from there, to hear with compliance, to assent, and following that semantic slope, to belong. The semantic cloud thickens: the obedient has an ear for the order, does what is proper, thereby belongs to their clan (or their chief: hörig is submissive, but also serfish, the obedient is the serf). It thickens and doesn’t stop at the border. Kuulua bears the same nuances, to hear, to belong, but also to concern, and to be supposed to, to behove (like gehören on the gallows). Can’t be by the by. Of course, etymologists have already looked into the matter. While the prosaic meaning (to hear) comes from the Proto-uralic ancestor *kuwle-, the figurative ones (to belong, to concern) are deemed a recent semantic loan from neighboring Swedish: höra is from the hörig, gehören, hīeran constellation, where the belonging connotation genuinely follows an agelong semantic drift (hear, obey, concern, serve, belong). (Hakulinen, 1955)
… ja aikojen kuluessa vaihdellen …
… and in varying degrees over time …
… vaihe… phase, stage… so, vaihdellen matches varying… aikojen… genitive of the times… kulu- is not kuulu-! As vaihdellen already captures in varying degrees, well, all that’s left is over in over time …
Kuluessa is a postposition and the lexicalization of an inessive, from kulua, to be consumed, and of time, to pass by: within (a lapse of time).
So, Germany whose self-image has long included ….
… perifeerisyys, metsäisyys, vuorisuus, barbaarisuuskin.
… peripherality, forestedness, mountainousness, even barbarousness.
Even lies in the suffix -kin.
The connection between the center and the Baltic world is via waterways: Vistula, Oder, Danube, Elbe and Dniester open onto the Black Sea, and from there, to the Greek and Eastern Roman worlds.
Eräät harvinaiset löydöt osoittavat, että Itämeren ympärillä on ollut paikallista ylimystöä, jonka kulttuuriin on kuulunut Välimeren maailmasta tuotettuja kalliita taide- ja kulttiesineitä.
Certain rare finds indicate that around the Baltic there existed a local aristocracy whose culture included costly art and cult objects imported from the Mediterranean world.
The threshold to the subordinate clause is the first thing we notice.
… paikallista ylimystöä, jonka …
… a local aristocracy whose …
Here, paikallinen, partitive paikallista, means local: knowing the word is absolutely no prerequisite to the identification. It’s enough to spot paika-, knowing that paikka is place. Yes, there is one k more in the latter. That’s where Finnish gets touchy. Let the revolution be brief and radical: cleansing the mind of the received idea, ingrained to the point of self-evidence for those foreign to the kind of gymnastics of which we shall only sketch the general outline, that a word has one and only one root. But having several roots makes no sense! At first sight, indeed, it doesn’t. A root is the core of a word, its primary morpheme, the smallest atomic subunit carrying its basic meaning - or what’s left when the word is pruned of all prefixes and suffixes, lexical or inflexional. Well, let’s try with paikallista:
paikallis-ta (partitive) → paika-llinen (adjective forming suffix denoting relation or possession) → paika-
It’s paika! As a matter of fact, we didn’t think enough about roots. We expect, once we have identified a word’s semantic core, that others will also have recourse to it: words from the same family (local, local-ity, local-ization, etc.). (In that acceptation, it seems English (also) says base word.) It’s still a synchronic viewpoint (slicing recent times away from the past, and doing linguistics in that slice). But some theorists rather think (diachronically) of roots as those antediluvian elementary meaning carriers that have been passed down through the ages (mean-ing, mean, from Old English mǣnan, to complain, to mean, from Proto-Germanic *mainijaną, to mean, to think, from Proto-Indo-European *moyn-éye-ti, to intend, to give opinion maybe, and maybe, ultimately, from *mey-, to change, to exchange; and from there down another ramification, Latin mittere, to send, giving English mass (in B minor), the failure or wrongdoing prefix mis- in misallege or mishap, etc.). Here, speculating is a source of great delight and sempiternal employment; a sort of multi‑millennial sandbox where castles are built with extreme diligence, only to be knocked down by an abrupt discovery.
Eventually, there is no clear consensus on the definition of root. Should it allow for small formal variants, while the meaning and genealogy are untouched (local, local-ity, loc-ate)? Let’s look again at paika-. It does run somehow in the family: paikka is quite near, even more so that its genitive is paika-n, its inessive paika-ssa. Trim both from the inflexional suffix and you have one lexical unit (one dictionary entry), two roots (or, say, two root forms).
In fact, two grades of a same root.
Astevaihtelu on sanavartaloissa ilmenevää äännevaihtelua, joka koskee klusiileja p, t ja k (marginaalisesti myös b, g), silloin kun klusiilia edeltää soinnillinen äänne eli vokaali tai soinnillinen konsonantti.
Grade alternation is a phonetic variation occurring in word roots that affects the plosives p, t, and k (and, to a lesser extent, b and g) when the plosive is preceded by a voiced sound, i.e., a vowel or a voiced consonant.
(Hakulinen, 2004)
That’s easy, might the novice hastily conclude, the nominative is the root and other inflexional cases undergo some phonetic variation. Well, except that said variation occurs under certain conditions, and with that, might affect some oblique cases or the nominative itself (in which case the "base root” appears in the oblique case(s), its variant in the nominative). There are two grades, weak and strong, whose occurrence often depends on whether the following syllable is open or closed. Then, gradation alters the quantity (the length, kk : k) or the quality (t : d) of the plosive consonant, according to a full breviary of patterns (strong : weak):
pp : p tt : t kk : k
mpp : mp ntt : t ŋkk : ŋk
lpp : lp ltt : lt lkk : lk
…
p : v t : d k : -
mp : mm nt : nn ŋk : ŋŋ
lp : lv lt : ll lk : l
…
You read correctly: spotting k, t, or mp in a nominative form (in an alerting position) isn’t enough to rule whether “its root” has weak grade (in which case the oblique cases might do kk, tt, mpp, when conditions are met) or strong grade (in which case the variants might go -, d, mm).
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It brings to mind a complicated board game that will never make it past the pilot phase because the testers fall off their chairs, or a medieval public autopsy in sugar-loaf hats hallucinating dodgy graph reasoning: (Galenic-tone) Our patient, my fellow physicians, has a choleric temperament, caused by an overabundance of yellow bile, geminated with blood and phlegm deficiency, etc.
Fortunately, reading and matching like a machine just needs to know that consonant gradation exists. In
… paikallista ylimystöä, jonka …
… a local aristocracy whose …
paika-llista bears the base word paikka, place, modulo some variation that looks pretty much like gradation - and thereby matches local.
What about that local aristocracy?
… a local aristocracy whose culture included costly art and cult objects imported from the Mediterranean world
… paikallista ylimystöä, jonka kulttuuriin on kuulunut Välimeren maailmasta tuotettuja kalliita taide- ja kulttiesineitä.
Literally,
… , jonka kulttuuriin on kuulunut …
reads
… , *to the culture of whom have belonged …
and the end of the clause is, at no surprise, upside-down, head-last:
… Välimeren maailmasta tuotettuja kalliita taide- ja kulttiesineitä …
… of the Mediterranean sea / from the world / fabricated / costly / art- / and / cult- objects …
Isn’t kalliis (partitive plural kalliita) at least faintly evocative of preciosity: of high value? The Proto-Finnic ancestor is deemed an Indo-European loan: the same base word runs in the Latin culmen, columen, collis, excello or the Proto-Germanic *hulliz, routing to hill: all things high.
Now, that elite is so limited in number that estimations are complicated.
Vaikutusten määrää ja väyliä on vaikea arvioida, sillä Itämeren alueen asukasmäärän on täytynyt olla suppea, ja siten on myös sen kulttuurivaikutuksille avoimimman johtokerroksen täytynyt olla pieni.
The extent and channels of these influences are difficult to assess, as the population of the Baltic region must have been sparse, and thus also its leading stratum - the one most open to cultural influences - must have been small.
Twice we meet on täytynyt olla, the only repeat in that sentence is must have been - evidence enough. We came across määritelty and määritellyt earlier, both participles of to define, in the passive and active voice respectively, which we recognized by its root määr-, määrä: amount, quantity, and from there, measure, limit, definiteness, degree. Here it is anew:
Vaikutusten määrää ja väyliä on vaikea arvioida …
The extent and channels of these influences …
and compounded with inhabitants:
… Itämeren alueen asukasmäärän …
… the population of the Baltic region …
Here is another manifestation of synthetic phrasing and compounding:
… sen kulttuurivaikutuksille avoimimman johtokerroksen ...
… of that / to cultural influences / most open / leading stratum …
A genitive here (sen johtokerroksen) is not that strange after all: it’s governed by on täytynyt. When something must be done, or must be the case, it’s not that something that must: the necessity comes from above. Simply, it’s an impersonal turn of phrase, and that independently of the active or passive voice: if we must exercise, it’s not we who are the injunctive principal (maybe that’s the personal trainer in our head), all we’ll do is eventually exercise. So
… *of that leading stratum it must have been …
… that leading stratum must have been …
It must have been pieni: small (sic).
Even if the sample is thin, proofs are enough:
Mutta näiden pienten johtokerrosten suurena esikuvamaailmana on ilman muuta ollut Rooman valtakunta, ehkä etenkin sen kreikkalainen puoli, ja jonkinlainen tietoisuus tästä suuresta maailmasta on varmasti vallinnut limes-rajan pohjoispuolisten heimojen parissa.
But the great world of reference for these small leading strata was without doubt the Roman Empire, perhaps especially its Greek half, and some kind of awareness of this great world must certainly have prevailed among the tribes north of the limes frontier.
That small elite literally *has the Roman Empire as a great world of reference: essive suurena esikuvamaailmana - the case of state and function, in the quality of, serving as. Compounding is really a thing in Finnish. Even trimmed of its ending, esikuva-maailma is no dictionary word. Its first constituent esikuva means example, paragon, model to be followed. So, conjugated with maailma: model-world. It’s not an isobaric tandem: world is leading, a model is what that world is, its property. The brick game goes on inside esi-kuva: the fore-image. If something is exemplary, if it’s fit to be imitated, you want it pictured before you, just as Dora Maar, posing in front of his palette, appears to Picasso. Maybe that’s reminiscent of the German das Vor-bild. Vorbild differs from Beispiel. The latter is the illustrative example, the bī-spel in Old High German, the by-talk, or what nears what we are talking about. The former is precisely the model we just described - and esikuva is its calque, via the Swedish före-bild. The way Finnish words compound is very Germanic too. It might not be the boilerplate expression, but die Vorbildswelt (Vor-bild-s-welt) would be perfectly clear and allowed in German, as compounding there is productive: you can glue any pieces ad libitum (once in a while, you’d better add a linking -s-, and the Rechtschreibung must have directives in full columns on where it’s mandatory and where verboten). Pretty much the same, it seems, applies to Finnish. It’s not possible for us to establish this way of doing things as an imitation (a procedural one) of the German: we note the similarity, and put forward the hypothesis of an influence. Why not in the reverse direction? Well, that’s history.
For the Baltic world has been first and foremost influenced, if we follow Klinge: starting with the ancient Greek and (Eastern) Roman Geist that capillarizes through the Vistula and other Eastern waterways.
Kaikki Itämeren piirin kielet heijastavat yhteiskunnallisen organisaation ja abstraktisten käsitteiden juurtumista, ja mytologia osoittaa taiteellis-uskonnollisten vaikutusten leviämistä idästä ja etelästä.
All languages of the Baltic sphere reflect the rooting of social organization and abstract concepts, and mythology points to the spread of artistic and religious influences from the east and south.
We can match the duet swiftly by just spotting roots we recall.
Kaikki Itämeren piirin kielet …
Kaikki is all.. kielet (head-last) is language… piirin is interesting: Estonian piir is limit, border, but also the territory it encloses… and in Finnish, well, that’s close: even if new to piiri, we can intuit its matching sphere: the interior of what’s delimited (it’s also the (material) ring of people (gathering), the allegoric group of people, the district) …
… heijastavat yhteiskunnallisen organisaation ja abstraktisten käsitteiden juurtumista, …
… heijast- is everything reflecting… juurtumista nears juuri, the root… of what? here word order at least informs: following the usual “upside-down” manners, the head noun of the whole nominal phrase comes last, preceded by that of its noun complement: the root of … concepts… so käsitteiden immediately matches concept… and that gets confirmed by morphology: käsi- is hand, and yes, a concept is something you grasp …
The German der Begriff is of the very same brew, related to begreifen, to grasp fully, to comprehend: com-prehend, Latin com-prehendēre, to seize together or fully,… Percolation of the metaphor from one language cluster to the other? Most likely. Maybe a calque (the morpheme by morpheme translation) from Swedish begripa, itself borrowed from Middle High German.
… ja mytologia osoittaa taiteellis-uskonnollisten vaikutusten leviämistä idästä ja etelästä.
Maybe we need to emphasize an important feature of matching-while-spotting-roots. It works both ways. Recognizing roots propels our understanding (our ability to successfully match), but understanding (by any other means) enriches reciprocally our lexicon of roots. And both ways are not mutually exclusive: we recall a little, syntax and punctuation guides us a bit, we assign probabilities to our hypotheses, and when things fall into place, all uncertainties switch to probability one. Let’s try (and that’s a trapeze act) to dissect the engine at work. The English counterpart was
… and mythology points to the spread of artistic and religious influences from the east and south.
… ja mytologia osoittaa… -ttaa, that’s the verb 3rd person singular indicative present: osoittaa must be points (to)… we think to remember osoit- is everything presenting (probability 0.8)… presents, points to… points to what? the spread must come last, so leviämistä (since ulterior idästä ja etelästä clearly is from the east and south: two things separated by ja/and and bearing the same function/case mark, plus we recall idä- and etelä- to be two cardinal directions (probability 0.6 and 0.2 for East and North resp.) which now get straight: idä- is East and etelä- actually South!)… leviämistä is spread? then levi- (actually, lev-) is everything wide, spread around (this rings a bell, probability 0.4, now 1)… vaikutusten… we know that one, vaikut- for influence… and from its preceding leviämistä, that’s the head of the noun complement of spread: confirmed… taiteellis-uskonnollisten is necessarily artistic-religious… taide, art: taide, taitee-… consonant gradation! etc.
Nothing but hypotheses, weight assignment, probabilistic matching: we are truly made in the image of our machines. Could there be other ways for a computational engine to match, to comprehend? Do all matching machines actually comprehend? Perhaps it is rather the machine that mimics us: replicating the electrical processes at work, in vain: for it lacks the avalanche of language, the tumbling of words in our heads - the narrow uniqueness of our experience, the scarcity that prods us to live.
In the west, the limes frontier comes under pressure from foreign forces as early as the 5th Century, while Eastern Rome, Byzantium, by contrast, lives on for another millennium. It's from there that the Greco-roman worldview sneaks into the Baltic world’s lexicon.
Rooman valtakunnan itäisen puolen merkitystä Itämeren maailman kannalta osoittaa se, että piispa Wulfila käänsi Raamatun 300-luvulla kreikasta samaan aikaan tai vähän aikaisemmin gootiksi kuin P. Hieronymus Stridonilainen käänsi sen latinaksi 300- ja 400-luvun taitteessa.
The significance of the eastern part of the Roman Empire for the Baltic world is demonstrated by the fact that Bishop Wulfila translated the Bible from Greek into Gothic in the 4th century, at the same time as or slightly earlier than St. Jerome of Stridon translated it into Latin at the turn of the 4th and 5th centuries.
The motifs repeat themselves, we move forward through a book in a crescendo of clarity.
itäisen… eastern… käänsi comes twice, just like translated… osoittaa again… to present, to point to, here to be matched to is demonstrated…
And while recognizing words, by their root, by their flexional ending and function, by their position, we confirm hypotheses - we get accustomed to the flow and manners of the Finnish syntax: osoittaa is an active voice, albeit rendered by an English passive. Literally,
Rooman valtakunnan itäisen puolen merkitystä … osoittaa se, että …
breaks down into:
of the Roman Empire / of the eastern part / the significance … demonstrates / this, / that …
where this functionally is the subject, the significance the object, that is, slightly more fluently and putting things the right way up:
*{This, that …} demonstrates the significance of the eastern part of the Roman Empire
or further:
What demonstrates the significance of the eastern part of the Roman Empire is, that …
It is too early to draw statistical conclusions. But we sense a way of turning phrases emerging. The frequency of occurrence will confirm or dispel the presentiment.
Tällöin Wulfila joutui kehittämään suuren joukon abstraktisia käsitteitä ja vaikuttamaan gootin kielen ja sitä kautta germaanisten kielten ja myös suomen/viron sanastoon ja sen abstrahoitumiseen.
In doing so Wulfila was compelled to develop a large number of abstract concepts, thereby influencing the vocabulary of the Gothic language and through it the Germanic languages and also Finnish/Estonian, and their process of abstraction.
Here, we can for instance pretty much ignore the meaning of kehittämään and vaikuttamaan, and still successfully match them to to develop and influencing respectively. It’s the symmetry of their functions and marks (-ttämään/-ttamaan) that betrays them: the translation calls for two verbs in mirror image to complement was compelled. The endings break down into the verb forming suffix -tta/-ttä (forming causative verbs from nouns, and that’s mostly by chance that both verbs share it), the infinitive III mark -ma/-mä, and the -aan/-ään of the illative. Once mearnings are matched through grammar, the roots, the base words imprint: kehit- for development, vaikut- (anew!) for influence.
The Carolingian attempts to break through to the North meet with limited success, but then Arab domination of the Mediterranean opens up new routes, of which the Baltic world is the hub: the Silk Roads. The Frisians and the town of Haithabun flourish.
Pohjanmerellä ja Itämerellä kehittyivät tällöin Reinin ja Elbin suistojen välillä elävät, karolingien valtakuntaan liitetyt friisiläiset merkittäväksi kauppakansaksi, jonka vaikutuksen tärkeä solmukohta oli Haithabun eli Hedebyn kaupunki Jyllannin niemimaan itänurkassa Dannevirken juuressa, nykyisen Schleswigin vieressä.
On the North Sea and the Baltic, the Frisians living between the estuaries of the Rhine and the Elbe, incorporated into the Carolingian empire, developed at this time into a significant trading people, whose important hub of influence was the town of Haithabu or Hedeby at the eastern corner of the Jutland peninsula at the foot of the Danevirke, next to present-day Schleswig.
These are the preludes to the Hanseatic League. In the 12th century, the northern towns confederate, trade organization takes shape: after Visby, in Gotland, Lübeck becomes the capital of the Hansa, whose sub-sets nonetheless have their own centers. Danzig, Riga, Visby, Tallinn, Copenhagen, Stockholm, Wismar, Stralsund, Stettin, Elbing along the Batic sea shores, besides Novgorod and other Russian centers, Hamburg and Flemish cities. Across this string of trading posts spreads the culture of the German town: a merchant culture and maritime worldview inspired by Venice or Genoa, the rise of merchant and computational technique, the emergence of a bourgeois class eager for representation, thrusts that ultimately permeate the arts, manners, and architecture. Tallinn becomes a hub for the dissemination of Low German.
Itämeren saksalaiskulttuurin yhtenäistävänä tekijänä oli alasaksan kieli, johon helposti liitettiin paikalliskielten sanoja ja ilmauksia; alasaksa itsessään oli lähellä tanskaa ja hollantia. Tallinnan suuri kaupunginarkisto, joka on keskeinen hansakauden talous- ja kulttuurihistorian lähde ja erittäin tärkeä Suomen, Ruotsin ja Venäjän kannalta, osoittaa alasaksan merkityksen, ja Tallinnan vaikutuksesta alasaksa levisi jossakin määrin koko sille laajalle alueelle - Pohjanlahden rannikoita myöten - missä Tallinnan porvareilla oli asiakkaita, ostajia ja velallisia.
The unifying factor of Baltic German culture was the Low German language, to which words and expressions from local languages were readily attached; Low German itself was close to Danish and Dutch. The great city archive of Tallinn, which is a central source for the economic and cultural history of the Hanseatic period and of great importance for Finland, Sweden and Russia, demonstrates the significance of Low German, and through Tallinn's influence Low German spread to some degree across that entire vast area - along the shores of the Gulf of Bothnia - where Tallinn's burghers had customers, buyers and debtors.
And here we have it anew: the straight predicative
The unifying factor … was the Low German language …
renders the detour
… yhtenäistävänä tekijänä oli alasaksan kieli …
featuring our earlier essive construct:
… as the unifying factor / was / the Low German language …
Subject and predicative complement, it seems, are upside-down (the new predicative complement is in the essive). That’s quite the same kind of gymnastics we see in the expression of possession:
… missä Tallinnan porvareilla oli asiakkaita, ostajia ja velallisia.
literally
… where / on [with, by] Tallinn’s burghers / were / customers, buyers and debtors.
English x is y turns into y is as x, x has y into y is by x. Our opening find
The Mediterranean region was Europe, the “known world”; …
that we felt to be somewhat headlong, seems less and less anecdotical. Trends, presentiments, frequency, confirmation.
Administration expands, drawing on a newly graduated class of civil servants, as power knows how to channel young ambitions to its advantage.
1400-luvulla Itämeren rannikolle perustetut uudet yliopistot, Greifswald ja Rostock, olivat jo monessa suhteessa kaupunkikulttuurin leimaamia. […] Syntyi uusi korkeatasoinen virkamiesluokka, joka usein myi palvelujaan useammallekin toimeksiantajalle. Tämäntapaisen virkamiesluokan varaan pyrkivät sitten rakentamaan hallintonsa kuninkaanvallan tehostamiseen tähtäävät hallitsijat, kuten Kustaa Vaasa Ruotsissa.
The new universities founded on the Baltic coast in the 15th century, Greifswald and Rostock, were already in many respects shaped by town culture. […] A new high-calibre class of officials came into being, who often sold their services to more than one employer. It was on such a class of officials that rulers aiming at the strengthening of royal power then sought to build their administration, such as Gustav Vasa in Sweden.
Ultimately, do we know when precisely the German suffuses the Baltic tongues? Well, that’s a millennia-long phenomenon according to Klinge. It all starts with the great reorganization of Europe in the 5th-6th centuries.
Siitä kertovat muun muassa ne monet sanat, jotka ensimmäisen tuhatluvun aikana lainautuivat gootista ja muinaissaksasta suomalaisiin ja balttilaisiin kieliin ja joiden joukossa ovat monien esineiden ja ruokien nimien ohella myös lähes kaikki aseita, yhteiskunnallista järjestäytymistä (kuningas, ruhtinas, tuomari) ja arvostuksia (kaunis), jopa värejä (keltainen) ilmaisevat sanat ja termit. Tätä vaihetta seurasivat sitten uudempiin yhteiskunnallisiin toimiin, varsinkin kauppaan liittyvät alasaksalaiset sanat (kaupunki, kauppias, raati, katu).
This [influence] is attested among other things by the many words that during the first millennium were borrowed from Gothic and Old German into the Finnish and Baltic languages, among which, alongside the names of many objects and foods, are also almost all words and terms expressing weapons, social organisation (kuningas [king], ruhtinas [prince], tuomari [judge] and values (kaunis [beautiful]), even colours (keltainen [yellow]). This phase was then followed by Low German words relating to newer social activities, especially trade (kaupunki [town], kauppias [merchant], raati [town council], katu [street]).
Or virka-mies, virka, official of German origin via Swedish virke, to function properly, to work.
Our learning Finnish like a machine thrives on this factual ground: notions recur, we move in circles through the small Baltic world. After two months of practicing our art, we can read entire stretches of it with no net. That’s a real pleasure.
References
Klinge, M. (2007). Itämeren maailma. Otava.
Huddleston, R., & Pullum, G. K. (2002). The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language. Cambridge University Press.
Hakulinen, L. (1955). Suomen kielen käännöslainoista. Virittäjä, 59(4), 305–318.
Hakulinen, A., Vilkuna, M., Korhonen, R., Koivisto, V., Heinonen, T. R., & Alho, I. (2004). Iso suomen kielioppi [verkkoversio, VISK § 41]. Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Seura.