Scandinavia Rules The Sound Waves

[glee]

I'm sure Kinky loves to visit Scandinavia too.

[lonesomesquare]

To be pedantic but educational: it's the Nordic countries that comprise of Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden as well as Faroer Islands etc.

Right you are, mr. v(i)p

I've even discovered the music of Teitur (www.teitur.com) who comes from the Faroer Islands!  A friend of a friend has been there as part of a scouts exchange and told him "that there's really absolutely nothing to see nor to do" - unquote.

But hey, one can always make music - and love - of course

[glee]

Just remembered at one stage it was reported to us that Mats Wilander was a fan of the Triffids. Don't let it keep you awake at night wondering if he still is.

[thokei]

favourite scandinavian band:
the watermelon men ( from sweden-uppsala)
3? albums- old,forgotten&great

#2: the Nomads ( old records )

[robweb]

Every 30 years or so, bands seem to sing a song in Swedish for a laugh too -.........Sverige by The Stranglers and, er, Alright Yeah [Swedish version] by R Hitchcock. Anyone know if they are comprehensible - or do they sound like 99 Red Ballons?

[vps]

At the operatic finale of Damien Rice's "Eskimo" the lyrics are sung in Finnish albeit with such a heavy accent that I for one cannot make out anything except "eskimoystäväni" which is Finnish for "my eskimo friend". The lyrics have been translated by a Finn, so they should make sense.

[Urpal]

The Finnish language looks rather a difficult one to learn.

I remember speaking to a Hungarian once and, on commenting at how the Hungarian language seems to have no relationship to the Slavic and Latin based languages of the nations surrounding it, was told that the closest language to which Hungarian is related, if any, is Finnish. Is there anything in this?

I was fascinated by the fact I heard somewhere that the Basque language apparently has no traceable relationship to any other language.

Being largely monolinguistic, I wouldn't know whether any of this is true or not.

[kuba]

Yes Urpal, Hungarian and Finnish belong, as far as I know, to the same language group: Ugrofinnish. I think these two are actually the only languages in this group. I also think there is a much closer relationship between e.g. English and Polish than between Hungarian and Polish or any other Slavic language. (Funnily enough, the Poles and the Hungarians are said to be "brother nations"; there is an old, traditional saying "Pole, Hungarian, two brothers", based on historical relationships).

[Urpal]

Any particular reason for this kinship? Is Hungary a predominently Catholic country, which seems to be an internationally recognised feature of Poland much like the Irish Republic.

On a related(ish) subject, I've come across the expression "Finlandisation" in learned texts over the years and wondered what the bloody hell that means? Is it something to do with the relationship Finland had with the former USSR at one time or another?

[Urpal]

Whoops. I find the answer to my question is roughly as I assumed though probably offensive to our Finnish members, so apologies for any unintended offence caused.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finlandisation

If it's any compensation, I always thought the expression puzzlingly meaningless and it was because I couldn't understand why Finland was selected as a special case for such terminology that I asked the question in the first place.

It seems to me that Finland should be proud of having maintained its political independence in view of it's geography and the events of modern history which passed by along it's borders.

[kuba]

Yes, Hungary is a Catholic country (over 60% of people are catholic I think), but that's not the reason for the relationship. It's because of quite significant a number of historical unions, marriages between the Polish and Hungarian dynasties (dating from the medieval), also the collaboration during the Spring Of Nations of 1848 etc.

[Urpal]

And how would you characterise Poland's relationship with modern day Ukraine, since a good chunk of the Western part of Ukraine formed part of Poland until relatively recently? I can't say I've set foot in Poland yet, but I have been in Lviv on a couple of occasions - which seems about as close as you can get to being in a place without actually being in a place, if you see what I mean.

How different are the Polish and Ukrainian languages if you drop the latin and cyrillic alphabets out of the window and are looking at them as spoken languages?

[kuba]

Lviv is probably the most Polish city outside Poland. A Polish city until 1945 and still with a very strong community I think.

The relationships between the two communities were difficult and full of tension, due to the battles by the end of the II World War (the UPA rising) and mainly Polish-Ukrainian war of 1919 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polish-Ukrainian_War). The second case has been finally closed in June this year when after years of arguments the Ukrainians agreed to open the old Polish cemetary ("The Lviv Eagles Cemetary") as a revenge to the Polish big support for Ukraine's Orange Revolution. (sorry if that's too simplified and not clear enough, I'm not a historian).

I don't know much about the Ukrainian language, probably it's quite similar to Russian, which I've learned in primary school for 2 or 3 years, but wouldn't understand much than 20-30% if it's spoken.

[Urpal]

Thanks for that, kuba, and the link to the history of the 1919 war between Poland and The People's Republic Of Western Ukraine as was. It sounds from this distance like a semi-independent part of the larger events surrounding the attempts made to topple the Bolshevik revolution at the time in and around Russia (though I believe Ukraine may have had it's own revolution before the Soviet Bolsheviks later moved in there).

One of many good reasons from history for counting myself lucky to live in a nation state whose borders are marked and controlled by the sea.

Ukrainian seems to someone with only a little gleaned knowledge of the languages to share some common features with Russian and others with Polish - and probably quite a lot of it's own. I suppose the same is true of English compared with French and German .

Anyway, kuba, have your propagandist efforts on behalf of the People's Popular Musical Army Of Triffidom managed to extend it's borders any further into Eastern Europe yet?

[vps]

Yes Urpal, Hungarian and Finnish belong, as far as I know, to the same language group: Ugrofinnish. I think these two are actually the only languages in this group.

That is almost the case. I think they call the language group Finno-Ugric, the largest of which are Hungarian, Finnish and Estonian. Estonian is actually fairly close to Finnish, and a quite a few Estonians speak Finnish because during the Soviet regime the only Western TV channels were the Finnish ones across the Gulf of Finland. Unfortunately, we Finns haven't really returned the favour and not very many Finns speak Estonian even if learning it would probably not be an immense effort. Also in the Fenno-ugric group are some fairly small and almost extinct languages including Sami which is spoken in Lapland by the indigenous Laplanders (in Sweden & Norway as well), and several tiny languages in what is nowadays Russia. However, they are not related to slavonic languages, or other European language families.

If it's any compensation, I always thought the expression puzzlingly meaningless and it was because I couldn't understand why Finland was selected as a special case for such terminology that I asked the question in the first place.

It seems to me that Finland should be proud of having maintained its political independence in view of it's geography and the events of modern history which passed by along it's borders.

Thanks Urpal! I agree. There are some rather unsavoury episodes in the Finnish history that we've had to go through in order to survive like our association with Germany at the end of the second world war, the debate over which continues to this day.
As for "Finlandisation", I think your analysis is correct in that after having survived two wars against the might of our neighbour the Soviet Union, in the Cold War atmosphere Finns were - maybe too much so - very cautious in their relationship with the U.S.S.R, especially since the Western European countries did not exactly flock to our help when the Soviets started their aggression against Finland in 1939.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finnish_Winter_War , see also the Continuation War bit for Germany's part in the war between Finland and the Soviet Union.