Pithy quotes from our current reading which give us pause to reflect

The use of English words or modified versions of these words have increased a lot during the last decades. Finnish is a tiny language with crudely 6 million speakers. The younger generation spends lots of time in the internet, mostly in groups where the participants speak English. At some point, my son seemed to have more opinions based on what he had read in Reddit than anything in Finnish. No wonder that the younger generations use more English words.

I prefer translating foreign words to Finnish. With some colleagues, we have started to use more Finnish because the professional words may have gotten a too used or negative tone. Biodiversity is one of those words. I prefer the word ‘elonkirjo’ (life spectrum) because it sounds better in Finnish and people do not associate it with the past fights dealing with protection of species or areas. Biodiversity is so much used word that it would be very difficult to get funding for a project that plans to study biodiversity - it just does not sell.

The Finnish way of spelling English words is - very Finnish. If we speak with foreigners, we try to spell the words as in English, sometimes added with a tone typical to a Finnish dialect. Some say it may be difficult to understand. With other Finnish speakers, we often spell the words as they would be Finnish words, exactly as they are written. With ‘we’ I mean the older generations - the younger ones often speak fluent English, British or American depending on personal history.

There is also a difference between ‘old’ names and new. For example, there is an old Finnish family with the name ‘von Wright’. It has included some brilliant painters. The family name is not spelled as the name Wright from England, it is spelled as it is written. So, the Finnish Wright can be immediately separated from any foreign Wright based on how the name is pronounced.

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