For the record, I do know that the word ye in the title should be spelled y^e. Unfortunately, WordPress doesn’t allow special characters in the post title. The spelling with the e in the superscript is the old written form of the Middle English definite article, basically the. Originally the definite article was denoted by a thorn (þ) in Old English, but with the invention of printing during the Middle English period, something else had to be concocted.

Hence we have y^e which these days is often erroneously spelled as ye. And that, my friends, means you, as in the archaic personal pronoun. So if you see a store called something like Ye Olde Christmas Shoppe (as in Edinburgh in Scotland, witnessed by yours truly), the store owner apparently wanted to call their store affectionately by names. “You old Christmas shop you, you naughty girl!” (Are shops and stores masculine or feminine though?)

Ye originally came to be used as the second person plural, the singular form being thou, but it spread to other uses as well. It could be used as a singular pronoun in nominative position, and as both singular and plural in an objective position. Fascinating how English exploits syncretism to the extreme.

Anyway. Here’s a newe paintinge for ya.

(Click to enlarge)

This is supposed to be Heath Ledger. I think it has a fair amount of likeness to him. The colours aren’t quite accurate, because I couldn’t take a non-overexposed photo of it and had to increase the contrast and highlight the midtones. It’s slightly sharper than in real life. This is the photo I used:

I didn’t paint the face narrow enough, and the expression is more benign methinks. Not as much chest hair, either.

My mum likes the painting though and she’s a hard person to please. She keeps saying that it looks so much like her old colleague who passed away some time ago. She liked that guy I guess.

Here it is in frames – mum is really good at picking frames that enhance the appearance of a painting:

My parents’ living room looks quite colourful with so many of my paintings in frames, against the backdrop of a warm yellow wallpaper. (The Yellow Wallpaper was a weird short story us English students had to read in basic studies, for your information. By Charlotte Perkins Gilman.)

I like to talk about people. There is really no direct equivalent for it in Finnish. I often talk about ihmiset, but that isn’t quite the same semantically. In correct Finnish, you should simply use the passive voice if you want to refer to people in general.

I believe ihmiset has been borrowed into Finnish from English, just like many other terms and grammatically innovative uses. For instance, the generic use of the pronoun you sounds quite bad in Finnish (sinä), but people (ihmiset) use it more and more. In a way I understand why the language police are concerned about this phenomenon of borrowing words and usages from English, but for the most part it simply fascinates me.

Obviously it’s a consequence of the lingua franca English having a higher position of prestige than Finnish. Moreover, the history of the written English language runs much further back in time than for Finnish. Early modern English (roughly from 1500 to 1600 or 1700, depending on who’s talking) is fairly easy to understand: the writing conventions were established earlier than in Finland and they were fairly well standardized during the 17th century.  The only real difficulties lie in the different meanings of words that haven’t changed in orthographical form or grammatical function.

As for written Finnish, well, its birth process was a very conscious and determined effort of the bishop Agricola who, following the principles of the reformation, wanted the ordinary people to learn to read religious and educational texts in their own language. How many could actually read in the 16th century, I don’t know. But Finnish was basically a spoken language until it suddenly became vogue in the 19th century due to the nationalist movement. Just how random is that?

Imagine if those educated Finns never wanted to create a Finnish nation with its own, written, respectable and civilized language. Would we speak and write Swedish still? Or what if the nationalist movement only believed in “one country and one nation” and left out “one language”? To my mind, it wasn’t a logically necessary part of the movement’s ideals. I doubt anyone had such a deep love for the Finnish language that it simply had to be developed into a “proper”, respectable language. Incorporating language into nationalist policy was a tool among many, for obvious reasons since language is part of defining your identity.

Bored? No? Good, I’ll continue.

By now you will have understood how different languages English and Finnish are and how they naturally have a different position in policies and identities. I like the fact that we have Kielitoimisto, a publically funded agency which gives recommendations for correct usage of Finnish. We need normative rules in order to function as a society, but the linguist in me can’t help but cringe at the dogmatic attitude that so many people subscribe to.

If Kielitoimisto says that you should insert a comma before subordinate conjunctions, then that’s what you must do if you want your language to be “proper”. Even if it makes absolutely no sense from the point of view of the semantic structure of the sentence and the intonational pattern when the text is read aloud, you simply MUST insert the comma. Because it’s been decided that you SHOULD.

The bottom line is, I can’t bring myself to see what’s so wrong about ihmiset or the generic sinä. The Finnish language has not deteriorated, whatever that might mean, because we have actually expanded the pragmatic and semantic usage of certain words. My reading into all this nonsense of complaining about bad Finnish is that it’s eternal as a phenomenon. Read a text concerning proper language use from the 18th century and you’ll find that old people complain about the youth ruining the language and not being able to handle the correct writing and speaking norms. These things just never change.

Therein lies the idea that Obama cultivated into successful  political self-promotion. Change. We mustn’t fight it but instead embrace it. Or let it pass at the very least.

It must be that he read what modern* linguists have been saying for years and realized what a healthy attitude they’ve got. Maybe he’ll be able to bring many more along.

*A problematic term in itself but I’m not going to be (too) pedantic about the use of modern in connection with linguistics. I’ll write more on that some other time.

I don’t really have anything worthwhile to report, but I don’t want this blog to look like it’s dead either.

So what have I been up to? Art-wise, nothing. Niente. Nulla d’importante. Non so che dire.

Io amo molto italiano. E una lingua molto bella. Si semplice, pure, logica. Delle lingue che so parlare, italiano è per vero la lingua la piu bella, eccetto finlandese.

Oh, I did buy a book, the Art of Mass Effect.

It’s got beautiful pictures, but I wish they’d put in more discussion about how they actually designed the characters and levels of the game. I’m interested in reference pictures and theme design and such. It was worth the moderate price though.

Fairly recently I also bought Videogames and Art. You can check out some pages at Google Books, over here.

I haven’t read it very thoroughly as of yet, but  I have mixed feelings towards what I have read. It’s a collection of articles pondering on whether videogames can or should be considered art – very academic, and no pictures! Well, actually the style isn’t always that high-brow, and some articles were badly edited. A couple of sentences were completely incomprehensible because of bad English grammar! You don’t see that too often.

Overall though it’s reasonably respectable writing, despite being aimed at the general reader. You can’t make much sense of it without some background in university-level literary analysis. Besides, it was published by Intellect Books. Books with intellect to those with intellect.

The topic is very close to my heart and topical to anyone interested in video games. There should also be another book on videogames coming out this year, written by some people at the Hypermedia department at the University of Tampere. I’m so looking forward to that!