I was reading Jennifer Wilson’s NYkr puff piece on former prime minister of Finland Sanna Marin (archived) and was rewarded with a few morsels of Finnish, for example the phrase at the end of this passage:
A few months later, Marin shocked foes and supporters alike by resigning from Parliament. It turned out that living like someone her age included experiencing millennial burnout, or, as Finns call it, palaa loppuun (“burn to the end”).
Googling it led me to this Finnish cover of Johnny Cash’s “Ring of Fire,” called “Loppuun palaa,” which features a bearded man in a bathrobe staring phlegmatically at the camera while two recorders (?) tootle in his ears; after a minute and a half it takes a turn that I won’t spoil, and by the end many mysteries remain. Later, I hit this sentence:
She lived, funnily enough, in the same co-op that Marin and Räikkönen used to, and she and her neighbors were having what Finns call a talkoot, a sort of community-gardening-and-cleanup event.
So I looked up talkoot, which is defined as “(usually in the plural) bee, dugnad (gathering for carrying out a major task, such as harvesting, construction or cleaning)”; the mysterious “dugnad” threw me for a loop, and though Wiktionary claims it’s English, a Google Books search suggests it’s used only when discussing Norway. In Norwegian (where the final -d is silent [not any more — see Trond Engen’s comment below]) it means ‘unpaid voluntary, orchestrated community work’; it’s derived from Proto-Germanic *duganą and is thus related to German taugen ‘(chiefly in the negative) to be fit’ and Scots dow ‘to be able; to be willing, to dare; to thrive, to prosper.’ “That pretty building’s storeys five; May all about it dow and thrive!”
talkoot… dugnad
Ah, twiza / tiwizi. Impressed they still have it in Finland; it’s not an institution that survives urbanisation well, as a rule.
talkoot… dugnad… twiza / tiwizi
Subbotnik in Soviet.
Puff piece? What happened to the hard-hitting exposes of Scandinavian politicians the magazine used to specialize in when Shawn was calling the shots?
How old are the talkoot/dugnad? The (perhaps townie version) Kehrwoche seems to be attested from late 15th C.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kehrwoche
Well the cat’s out of the bag now.
Hat (OP): the mysterious “dugnad” threw me for a loop, and though Wiktionary claims it’s English, a Google Books search suggests it’s used only when discussing Norway. In Norwegian (where the final -d is silent) it means ‘unpaid voluntary, orchestrated community work’
Last things first, yes, that what it means.
The final -d is not very silent. The -nad words have been reclaimed from dialects (by way of written and broadcasted Nynorsk) into Bokmål, and now most people use a reading pronunciaton. A few -nad words have become standard terms also in Bokmål: In addition to dugnad there’s søknad “application (for a job etc.), merknad “remark”, and bunad “(orig.) equipment, furnishing; (now) formal traditional costume”. Others are (in Bokmål) restricted to poetic or historicizing registers: lagnad “destiny” and marknad “market” are possibly the most common, but it doesn’t stop there. Essentially, any Nynorsk or dialect word can be used for effect in Bokmål.
Thanks — I was relying on Einar Haugen, who is of course wildly out of date by now. We’ll see if I can assimilate this new information!
I wouldn’t say “chiefly in the negative”, though I’m sure that varies.
Also das taugt mir (rather colloquial) “I like that”, “I like doing that”.
Since you included an enigmatic Finnish video, I thought you might be interested in this one). (It has subtitles, which are clarifying but spoil the charm, IMO).
Norw. Det duger for meg. “That works for me.”
I never heard that phrase. It sounds very weird, even ungrammatical to me. Although I agree that “mostly in the negative” is (a bit) exaggerated.
Well, Wiktionary’s full definition list is:
So apparently the positive use is dialectal.
@ulr
From Jean-Paul, Titan, Band IV:
—
Gaspard war zufrieden: „nur um einen
Aufschub halt’ ich bei Euch an (fügt’ er noch
bei); mein Freund, der Fürst, ist seinem Ende
wieder näher — die wohlthätige Wirkung, die
auf ihn eine Geister-Erscheinung gemacht, hat allmählig nachgelassen, und er fürchtet täglich die Wiederkunft des Phantoms, das ihm die letzten Stunden vorauszusagen versprochen. —In solcher Zeit taugt mir Euer Fest nicht.
—
https://www.deutschestextarchiv.de/book/view/paul_titan04_1803?p=272
I am not saying the sense is “I don’t like”, but maybe this is less weird.
In my dialect, which seems to be close to the Standard in this regard, taugen is mostly used in negative or limiting constructions (die Hose taugt nur noch für die Gartenarbeit “the trousers are only good for Garden work anymore”), but occasionally it can be used in positive contexts Das taugt für diesen Zweck “That is good for this purpose”. What is dialectal is the specific construction X taugt Y-dative “Y likes X”.
OK, I watched the “Loppuun palaa” video and here’s my interpretation. The gentleman in the center of the video is extremely hung over. He tries to make some peace in his head, but it is impossible because two recorders keep playing “Rings of Fire”. He tries to block it out by focusing on his breakfast, doesn’t work; then he puts on earmuffs, no luck; at the end his only option is to travel to the middle of Alaska and it finally helps.
Now that seems off to me; I’m used to more general uses than one individual game.
A good example of the accent that has let ä drop all the way to [a], producing an /a/-/ɑ/ distinction… except the /ɑ/ in this one seems only central, so I find them hard to tell apart!
I had to remind myself that all these [b̥] are spelled p…
I think the old rural barn-raising etc. version is in fact fairly endangered and the most common talkoot these days are collective (e.g. housing company) cleaning events or (e.g. hobby association) charity projects.
Sounds like a perfectly normal ä to me. There’s a few dialects in the far southwest that have [ɛ] but most of the time anything in that direction would rather indicate a Swedish accent (or, I suppose, some types of German or AmEnglish). The slightly [ɐ]-like a is less universal though yes (if common in the south).
I’ve heard the [æ] I expected, but I’ll readily believe you that’s not in the majority anymore. I haven’t even been to Finland.
I do mean, that is [æ] and not [a] as far I am concerned.
(IPA’s “[a]” is kind of fake anyway, /a/ means usually a central vowel that in proper narrow IPA ‘should be’ [ä]. Properly front [a] as in e.g. Persian or Hungarian is not very common.)
I indeed suspect the idea that [æ] and [a] differ in tongue height/frontness position at all might be incorrect: on a little experimentation I believe this could be possibly more due to tongue shape, e.g. such that [æ] is +ATR and [a] is -ATR, or possibly relatedly, in how convex/tense the frontmost part of the tongue is kept; tense in [æ], lax in [a]?
French has a proper [a], which is precisely why that symbol is defined as it is.
(I think some Englishes have also reached that point.)
There’s definitely something going on there that Daniel Jones imagined wrong, but what it is is another question. I like the idea I learned from John Cowan right here that [æ], as found in a lot of Englishes, is actually epiglottalized [ɛ], but I can’t test that either.
Oh, speaking of Daniel Jones, the recording of him demonstrating [a] is actually “around the corner” – it’s beyond French and, just barely, in what is [æ] territory for me…
Among the “Changes Well Established” in current GB pronunciation, Alan Cruttenden lists
GB stands for “General British”, his replacement term for Received Pronunciation (a term apparently first introduced by Windsor Lewis), CGB for “conspicuous” GB, a very conservative pronunciation (much closer to the common caricature of RP).
I just wondered, with the discussions of tongue position, whether any languages use the lateral placement of the tongue to vary vowel quality.
Clearly a tongue in cheek hypothesis.
Apicobuccality.
How do you mean, “lateral placement of the tongue”? Like, articulate a vowel with the tongue off to one side? That doesn’t change the vowel quality.
Off to both sides, widened, as in [ɬ].
I don’t know any examples, but vowel velarization is phonemic in some of the harder-core Rgyalrongic languages.
Velarization is not lateralization. If you can pronounce an [i] or an [a] with the tongue’s edges lowered, that’s not going to sound any different than a plain vowel.
It does when I try it, but I’m probably not doing it right.
Moving the tongue to one side certainly does change vowel quality, as it’s trivial to test. Why would anyone think otherwise?
We must be doing something different. Are you at the same time changing its height or frontness? Put another way, is the lateralized vowel like some other non-lateralized one?
I had initially tested just a couple vowels for effects, but I did it more systematically this time. I performed the tests in front of a mirror to make sure that all I was doing was moving my tongue to the side. What I found was, in retrospect, not surprising. It makes a big difference what vowel I started with in how much the quality changed when I moved my tongue to the side. A low front vowel changed hardly at all; there was a difference, but it was so slight that I cannot imagine it ever being phonemic. On the other hand, with a high back vowel, the change was quite marked. If I get something like ɤ when my tongue is located in the center, it becomes quite different when I move the tongue to the side. What is evidently happening is that the back of the tongue is changing the geometry at the point of articulation and so changing the vowel quality. I also tried to test the effect of rounding, but I found it too hard just to move my tongue horizontally while making a rounded vowel.
Sorry for the confusion – I mentioned velarization as a very rare but known feature that should be somewhat similar.