Old words

13 Apr, 2025

Some words are old. Old and unchanged.

In addition to maps, I spend time clicking through etymologies on Wiktionary. Most English words are Indo-European and their reconstructed Proto-Indo-European roots look like gibberish: "h₂el-" ("old"), "h₂enǵʰ-" ("English"), "wr̥dʰh₁om" ("word"). It's obvious why you'd need a degree or two to initially make the connection.

Finnish, on the other hand, has plenty of words that are the very same as they were when the Uralic protolanguage started to branch out about 5,000 years ago. For example, "lumi" ("snow"), "minä" ("I)", "neljä" ("four"), "muna" ("egg"), "suksi" ("ski"), "tuli" ("fire"), "kala" ("fish") are all the same in their reconstructed form as they are in modern-day Finnish.

To put that into perspective, these words have resisted change several times the length of Christianity itself. At least. And 5,000 years ago is just when Uralic languages started to split. God knows when those words were originally invented.

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Finland has the identity of a small country and language. If we're mentioned in foreign media, it's a big thing. If an international celebrity is spotted at a restaurant, it's national news. There's even a long-standing joke that we go to the square to celebrate Finland being noticed.

It's true that there's "only" about five and a half million Finns, i.e. less than one in a thousand of the world's population. Buuut, I'd argue that we're bigger than we lead ourselves to believe.

Finland is in the largest third in terms of landmass, the mid third for population, in the top quarter regarding GDP and Finnish is the 25th-biggest language on the internet. And that's just Finland alone—our extended language family has over 30 members, is spoken natively in places as far away from each other as Hungary and northern Russia's Taymur peninsula (that's over 5,000 kilometers!) and shares ancient roots.

I guess our geographical periphery and the fact that Finnish is so different from most languages in Europe accentuates the feeling of smallness. Also, during the Cold War, Finland was the only country on the Western side of the Iron Curtain, which meant that Finland was cut off from its linguistic relatives. As part of Finlandization, we self-censored and actively ignored those relations... and also forgot them, it often seems.

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Why and how are related languages important? I'll leave you with a quote from Estonian president Lennart Meri's book. In the story, he's 12 years old, has been deported with his family from Estonia by Soviet occupiers and finds himself at a train station in central Russia where he meets people who speak Mari, a related language:

It was then when I experienced something that I couldn't know would mark the start of a special interest towards Finno-Ugric people, which later turned professional. We went to a small market to barter, and my mother counted out loud the number of eggs—in Estonian, of course. She grabbed them in pairs and said: "two, four, six, eight, ten". Suddenly, everyone who heard her fell silent [...] until one astonished person asked: "Is it possible that you have the same words as we do in our mother tongue?"¹

The Meri family wouldn't have known where they are and quite likely wouldn't have ever even heard of Mari people before. Imagine how comforting it would be to find a slice of home in a destitute situation like theirs. For Lennart Meri, that feeling lasted a lifetime.

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P.S. I don't mean to associate size and age with greatness or something mystical. (There's a lot of nationalist pseudoscience and fantasizing about glorious pasts and Finland has its own fringe theorists.) To me, part of Finland's appeal is precisely the fact that so much about the country is fairly young. We don't have a cultural framework 1,000+ years long to refer to. We don't have a long list of historical figures who the whole world is familiar with. There's room to try new things and to be yourself without much pressure.

So, in this blog post, I just wanted to share some cool facts from the narrow sliver of Finnish culture that legitimately is old—prehistorical, in fact—and that's in contrast with how we often see ourselves.

#English #Finland #Finnish #Uralic #by-hannes #identity #languages #words