26 avril 2007

corresp. fr. Finlandia:
26 Apr. 2007


Hey!

Thanks for your mail. Yup, we had a meeting concerning your list last week. Just to start things off, your question about the phrase WHALE FUCKER:

There is no such expression in the Finnish language. Whales almost never go through the Kattegat and Belt Sea straits to reach Finnish waters at the Gulf of Finland or the Gulf of Bothnia. Thus, whale-related vocabulary is absent in common Finnish. The literal translation is "valaannussija", if you want to use it.

That brings me to your list:

I hope we haven't done things wrong, though we tried to follow the job-description on page one.

We added many current ones, not only in the brackets specifying "add more examples,” and we rearranged the previous, corrected grammar, removed some obsolete terms, adding more familiar terms at the top, removing ones that had no business being in that category in the first place.

The four of us in the panel, well adversed in obscenities, had trouble recognizing some terms.

Some slurs, particularly the ones pertaining to copulating with various members of one‚s family (fuck your mother, father, sister, uncle, etc.) are uncommon in the Finnish language. Slurs such as these, I believe, are more frequent in the catholic countries.

Finally: we only had a day at this, so any questions you may have and/or revisions (if possible, we'd like to check the final draft for the Finnish section) will be more than welcome.

The sub-groups between phrases was quite specific, so I'm sure we've ignored repeating a few. Also, we've corrected the English translations ONLY where the meaning of the phrase was incorrect. I'm sure you'll go through these while editing.

I'll get back to you on the pseudonym to be used between the 4 of us later. In answering to this mail, would you please press the EPLY ALL button? Thanks!

Till soon,

k____



P.S. Worth mentioning: In the book “Mother Tongue,” the famed author Bill Bryson mentions that the Finns don’t swear at all (page 210, the Penguin Books paperback edition, 1991). Judging by the list enclosed, someone’s f***ked with Bill Bryson’s research.