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What’s with this “Wren” thing?
The oldest extant version of the fable
we
are presenting here appeared in 1913 in the first volume of a two-volume anthology
of Low
Saxon folktales (Plattdeutsche
Volksmärchen “Low German Folktales”)
collected by Wilhelm Wisser (1843–1935). Read
more ...
Finnish
Finland,
where Siberia met Germania
Language Information: Finnish is currently used by approximately six million people, of which about five million
live in Finland. It is also used in some other countries, especially in Russia,
Estonia, Sweden and Norway as well as in overseas immigration countries.
Finnish is a Finnic language that is fairly closely related to Estonian, thus belongs to the Uralic family of languages. For centuries, Finnish was influenced by Germanic languages, particularly by Swedish and by ancient Germanic.
Like its close relative Estonian, Finnish retains ancient names for surrounding countries and peoples.
For
example,
Sweden
is know as Ruotsa, the land of the Rus Viking élite that gave the Russians their name; and Germany is known as Saksa, hailing back to times when what is now Northern Germany was Saxony, the land
of the Saxons.
Åbo/Turku,
where the Middle-Saxon-speaking
Hanseatic League used to trade with what is
now Finland
Stadi (from Swedishstad ‘town’,
‘city’) is a Finnish-based variety with numerous Swedish and Russian loans. It has been used, with various permutations, in the Finnish capital Helsinki/Helsingfors for about one century and is now being replaced by a mostly English-influenced variety. Stadi permits sound combinations, such as consonant clusters, that are alien to Finnish phonology.
A few examples of Swedish loans in this translations are bygannu (‘built’ from Swedish bygga ‘to build’ for Finnish muodostaa, rakentaa), flygannu (‘flew’,
from Swedish flyga ‘to fly’ for Finnish lentäneet), faija (‘father’, from Swedish fader ‘father’ for Finnish isä), froogas (‘asked’, from Swedish fråga ‘to ask’ for Finnish kysyä), öögilla (‘with (his) eyes’, from Swedish öga ‘eye’ for Finnish silmillään), flyttas (‘moved’, from Swedish flytta ‘to move’ for Finnish lensi), ventatkaa (‘wait!’, from Swedish vänta ‘to wait’ for Finnish odottakaapaa), höörnin (‘(around) the corner’ from Swedish hörn ‘corner’ for Finnish kulman), and lyftas (‘lifted’ from Swedish lyfta ‘to lift’ for Finnish koipeaan).
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