Hey Hey, Kuni Keksit!

My husband Whitney and I spent twelve days this August in Finland and Sweden, with a short day trip to Tallinn, capital of Estonia, across the Baltic Sea.

It was a trip that fell into place with only weeks of planning. He was given a three month sabbatical that started in early June, and sometime in July agreed we’d take a “roots quest” to see the places where his family and family name began. Just days before our trip, we emailed several Finnish relatives, and were honored to find cousins rearranging schedules to meet us for dinner, show us family graves, and take us to places important to his extended family.

As always, being in another country set me thinking about words, about how unfortunate it is that as Americans we rarely find ourselves in that enlightening space where language and meaning step apart and invite us to rethink our understanding.

Those moments are frequent in places where translation is necessary daily. Finland is a country of two national languages, Finnish and Swedish. By law, in bilingual municipalities (where 8% of the population or at least 3,000 people speak the minority language) legal documents are translated and authorities need to be fluent in both languages. In places with both Finnish and Swedish names, both appear on signs (or are announced on trains, subways, ferries). The Sami people, (in English called Laplanders), are also entitled to services in their own language. And all children are taught English, beginning in grade 3, to ensure entry into global commerce and culture.

Nuances of speech, difficulties of interpretation, awareness of the limitations of  language are part of the air the Nordic nations breath.

In Finnish and Swedish, the word for  “hello” is “hey!”  As an English-speaker, it feels a little rude to say “hey” to someone I’ve never met, but  “hey “ is the one Finnish word I can now say with real confidence. That and  “hey hey,” which means good-bye. I’m not much more fluent in anything else, although I studied French for years, took years of Latin, a semester of German.

One of the goals for our journey was to better understand the last name “Kuniholm,” a name created by Whitney’s great-great grandfather sometime in the 1840s.  Our time in Finland offered new context. Apparently in Finland it was common, until legislation in 1921, for surnames to change with each generation, depending on location, parentage, or personal whim. Johan’s son became “Johannson.” Johan Johannson, Whitney’s great-great grandfather, added a last name from a farm he bought: the Holm farm, then moved to a tplace named Kuni and became Johan Johanson Kuniholm.

We had been told somewhere along the way that “Kuni” meant King, and “Holm” meant hearth. Spend a day or two around the Swedish language and it quickly becomes clear that “Holm” is a variant of “Holmen,” which means island. Except when it doesn’t: it more likely means “very small island,” but can also mean the low flat land along a river, lake, or sea. The Holm farm of the family name was nowhere near an island, but might have been a low, flat farmstead along the Malsor Channel.

Kuni is equally tricky. A sign on Suomenlinna, or Sveaborg, the sea fortress guarding Helsinki's harbor that once rivaled Gibraltar, points toward “Kuninkaaportti" or "Kungsporten," "King’s Gate.” The Swedish word for king is “kung”, but there’s no translation for kuni in Finnish. King is "kuningas". An Old Norse word study suggests kuni means “royalty.” Maybe.

A sign for cookies in a Helsinki market suggested a different direction. "Kuni Keksit." I asked the young woman behind the counter what Kuni Keksit were. “Queen Cookies” was the confident response. Why Queen? She struggled for an answer: “It’s the berries. The kuni berries.”  A particular kind of berry? No – a group of berries. Queen berries. Blueberry, cloudberry, and some others that wouldn’t translate into English. She tried, then gave up. Finland has 37 edible species of berry. We have names for just a fraction.

We had reserved a car for the trip north to the village of Kuni. We found it in Ostrobothnia, a Swedish-speaking region of Finland, just 50 miles from Sweden across the Gulf of Bothnia. It’s in a region that never had a king, except the rule of Swedish, then Russian royalty. Kuni itself is hardly a  place, just a tiny hamlet, with a pretty little school, a car repair lot, a trailhead for a beautiful woodland trail, a few small farms, some houses.

Was the town named after royalty, or to highlight the berries that grew in the woods  and the brambles along the river? We have no way of knowing – so far at least. Maybe some Finnish cousins will enlighten us. Until then, we have only theories.

There are many words that can’t translate from Finnish to English. A short sampling (with apologies for the very rough approximations):

• "myötähäpeä," which means vicarious embarrassment, feeling embarrassed on behalf of someone else 
• "jokamiehenoikeus": freedom to roam, travel through and enjoy wild harvests in the countryside, including private landholdings 
• "tokka": a large herd of reindeer 
• "lieko": the trunk of a tree submerged on the bottom of a lake
• "sisu": stoic courage and determination

Every language has words that are immediately understood in that language, yet hard to explain in another. On a lovely ferry ride to Birka, once center of Viking enterprise in Sweden’s Lake Mälaren, I found myself talking with two Swedes about birds, history, language, politics. We found ourselves stalled on a word that would adequately capture the ongoing discussions one of the group described having with his young adult granddaughter: not arguments. Not disagreements. No – discussion didn’t work. What is the word in English for impassioned, spirited, carefully thought-through conversation about things that matter deeply? The Finns around us scratched their heads and shrugged. They knew exactly what the man was saying. They had no idea how to put it into English.

In the days since our return, I’ve been thinking about translation: what’s lost in conversations between nations, what we lose when we approach words as if every word in one language can be replaced, one for one, with an equal word in another.

And I’ve been thinking about the challenge of reaching back in time to understand what words meant when used by those before us. If the word “Kuni” is a distant whisper of meaning, what about those ancient Hebrew words from the early books of Genesis? We know what some of them meant, and have broad theories about others. Yet some Christians read those texts as if the exact meaning is captured precisely – forever! – in the structure and idiom of their own preferred English version.  

I’ve been thinking of the dangers of a simplistic understanding of language and translation, and the more immediate danger of using words in the public arena with little care or understanding about actual meaning or historical resonance. Socialism, communism, Nazi: those words take different shape in small countries just miles from the Russian border, just across the Baltic Sea from Germany.

And from that vantage point, language about rounding people up, sending them back, “Making American Great” by building walls and eliminating outsiders sounds dangerously familiar, raising discussion about difficult words like fascism, totalitarianism, nativisim.

I’ll be exploring some of these words, and others, in the months ahead. I’m more convinced than ever that we are accountable for the words we use or misuse, the words we hear, the words we pretend we don’t hear.

Texts in Context: Yassas!

Yassas!

That’s Greek for hello, goodbye, cheers, “to you!”

And a makeshift “thank you” for those (like me) who can’t quite manage efkharistó (eff-car-ee-STOH), the official Grecian “thank you.”

I recently spent two weeks in Greece and every time I tried to say a proper “efkharistó” I was rewarded with puzzled looks and general incomprehension. The receptionist at our hotel suggested an easier alternative might be to say “yassas!” when I entered, when I left, and whenever a thank you, or other general greeting, was needed.

Then she tried to complicate things by explaining that “yassas,” written Γειά σας, geia sas, or yia sas, is plural, or “formal,” while “yassou”, written γεια σου, gia sou, yia shoe, is singular, or informal. So while I could say “yassou” to her, or a shopkeeper, or a waiter, she, and they, would need to say “yassas” to me.

I'm not big on status distinctions (a customer is "above" a shopkeeper or waiter? in what way?) so I finally decided that “yassas” would work in any situation, and sure enough, a friendly “yassas” brought an equally friendly “yassas” (or, sometimes, “Ya!”) in return, and sometimes prompted conversations about what natioanality I might be (Italiká? Germanós?) Apparently, most Americans don't bother with even simple greetings. 

My time in Greece was prompted by my husband Whitney’s need to attend a series of meetings with international Scripture Union colleagues, so our first week was spent in the company of Scripture Union friends from a mix of other countries.

I was reminded, in conversation with these multilingual friends, that as a native English speaker my understanding of language, of translation, of the interplay of meaning and words, is shaped by my experience as a monolinguist in a world where I have the luxury of expecting literature, media, politics, finance to meet me in my mother tongue.

Scripture Union friends near the steps to Mars Hill

There are plenty of benefits to growing up immersed in English.

Yet, as I talk with friends from smaller linguistic populations who grew up fluent in second, sometimes third and fourth languages, I’m aware that there are benefits to engaging words, texts and ideas in unfamiliar linguistic contexts.

Among other benefits of multilingualism, "children and older persons learning foreign languages have been demonstrated to:

• have a keener awareness and sharper perception of language;
• be more capable of separating meaning from form;
• display generally greater cognitive flexibility, better problem solving and higher-order thinking skills;
• see their own culture from a new perspective not available to monoglots, enabling the comparison, contrast, and understanding of cultural concepts. 

Here's an observation I find intriguing: "a person who speaks multiple languages has a stereoscopic vision of the world” ( Vivian Cook, 2001).

I wrote last week about the way the “plausibility structures” of our culture can shape and define our understanding of what’s possible. There’s interesting research suggesting that our language itself can limit our comprehension. We see and understand what we have words for; we miss the reality that slips by the contours of our language.

A simple example: words for color. In English, we have eleven basic colors. Some languages have only two (dark and light), some have four (white, black, red, green). Some have twelve. Just a few variations:

• Latin originally lacked a generic color word for "gray" and "brown" and had to borrow its words from Germanic language sources.
• Classical Greek is said to not have had different names for blue and black.
• Biblical Hebrew had no word for blue.
• Navajo has one word for both grey and brown and one for blue and green. It has two for black, however, distinguishing the color of "coal" from that of "darkness".
• Russian, Italian, and Greek  have different basic words for darker and lighter shades of blue. Russian has голубой and синий; Italian has azzuro and blu; Greek has γαλάζιο and μπλ.   

Another simple example: the Inuit of North America have at least a dozen words for snow, and ten or more for ice. Examples: 

• qanik snow falling
• aputi snow on the ground
• pukak crystalline snow on the ground
• aniu snow used to make water
• siku ice in general
• nilak freshwater ice, for drinking
• qinu slushy ice by the sea 

I wrote earlier this year about the multiple words for love offered in classic Greek: agápe, éros, philía, storgē, ludus, pragma, mania, philautia. Even now, Greek offers more variations on “love” than English. Here’s a fun, slightly puzzling experiment: google translate “love.”  Then try to reverse it. The idea of a one-for-one transference quickly disappears.

Thinking about languages, the hazards of monolingualism, the benefits of multilingualism, I came across an interesting historical discussion: what language did Jesus speak? And what is the original language of the New Testament?

As members of a small nation frequently conquered by the powers of the day, as part of a people group needing a language of trade to do business with the surrounding economies, most Jews of Jesus’ day spoke Hebrew, did business in Aramaic, read classic Greek, and would have known at least a little Latin.

While there are some scholars who argue that the New Testament was originally written in Hebrew, and others who posit an Aramaic New Testament, the general consensus is that the early texts were written in Koine Greek, a “common” Greek used as the regional language throughout the area conquered by Alexander the Great. Even the Romans depended on Koine Greek in administering the Roman Empire, while Latin was the language of the military and the courts.

Biblical Tours Greece: Voula Kalapoda, Costos Tsevas,
and Theo  Karvounakis

During our time in Greece, we had the great privilege of spending time with staff from Hellenic Scripture Union and the guides of their Biblical Tours. On a chilly March morning forty-some Scripture Union representatives from over a dozen countries boarded a bus to visit Corinth. Our guide, Costos Tsevas, lost no time in explaining his goal of setting Biblical texts in context: geographic, historic, linguistic. He suggested that the linguistic, even philosophical context of a regional Greek language and habit of discourse enabled the rapid spread of the Christian faith in a way that would not have been possible in other times and places.

As he talked, I dug in my bag for paper and pen and found myself taking notes on the back of our itinerary, on the margins of a map. Through Costos, and his years of training as a guide, his years of reading about Biblical texts, his lifetime speaking of Greek and bridging the divide between Greek and English, I found myself seeing and hearing in new ways.

Members of the group were asked to read parts of passages in English, with the warning that they'd be interrupted. "Wait," Costos would say mid-text. "Read what that says again. Now in Greek, it says . . ." and he'd be off, explaining the fuller meaning of a term, showing how translation had flattened, skewed, or in some other way altered an important concept. 

I will never know another language well enough to have that “stereoscopic vision of the world” available to speakers of multiple languages, but through time spent with Costos, and then further travels to other Biblical sites with his colleague, Voula Kalapoda, I have new insights into Biblical texts and their contexts.

I”ll be working through my notes in the weeks ahead, posting insights, sharing observations and some of my thousand or so photos.

And remembering, with great gratitude, the welcome and generosity we experienced in beautiful, wonderful Greece.

Yassas!

An Altogether Different Language

remains of Murbach Abbey,
near Le Rimlishof, Buhl 

There was a church in Umbria, Little Portion,
Already old eight hundred years ago.
It was abandoned and in disrepair
But it was called St. Mary of the Angels
For it was known to be the haunt of angels,
Often at night the country people
Could hear them singing there.

What was it like, to listen to the angels,
To hear those mountain-fresh, those simple voices
Poured out on the bare stones of Little Portion
In hymns of joy?
No one has told us.
Perhaps it needs another language
That we have still to learn,
An altogether different language.

      (Anne Porter, An Altogether Different Language, 2006) 

On Pentecost morning, I found myself at breakfast at Le Rimlishof, a retreat and meeting center owned by the French Scripture Union counterpart, Ligue pour la Lecture de la Bible.

There were five of us around the table – from five different countries: Sri Lanka, Switzerland, Argentina, Germany, and the US. The conversation turned easily to Pentecost, to language, and to the challenges of Bible translation when the history and use of a word can alter its meaning, when many in the world speak a language that has no written history, when putting a word into writing can be a political act with layers of meaning no one can foresee.

Le Rimlishof main lodge

Listening to my international friends talking, it occurred to me that Christians from the United States are at a sharp disadvantage in our understanding of language and of scripture, even as we enjoy a luxury few in the world have: we are surrounded by people who speak our language, and we are taught a written tradition centuries deep, with no need to wrestle with translation of complex ideas. As a result, we are not confronted, as so many others are, by the difficulties of nuance, the intricacies of connotation and denotation. We have no need to live across linguistic divides, as do the German Swiss working alongside the French Swiss, the Tamil Sri Lankans living beside the Sinhalese. In our simple understanding of language, we’ve come to believe that translation is a straightforward transaction: each word has a meaning that can be exchanged for an equal word with identical meaning, with no loss of understanding, no muddying of intent.

For those who speak multiple languages, that belief is amusing, child-like, even dangerous.

View of Buhl from Le Rimlishof

We spent four days at Le Rimlishof. While the Scripture Union staffers spent their days in meetings, looking for ways to work across cultural and language divides in engaging people around the world in reading the Bible, I wandered the beautiful village of Buhl, taking photos of the neat kitchen gardens, enjoying unfamiliar birdsong, sampling pain de chocolate from the two small bakeries in the village center.

Rejoining the group for meals, I’d ask for clarification and correction from the German and French Swiss representatives. What is “swartzwurzel”? Black root, poor man’s asparagus, winter asparagus. A perennial root-crop. Peel it, boil it, and use it as you would asparagus.

What is “col”? I saw numerous arrows pointing toward “Col de Shrangen,” “Col de Bannstein,” “Col de Peternit.”  

That one was not so easy. It’s the same root as collar: something to do with the neck. But as a place? It’s the low part between two mountains. My translators struggled to find the right word.

“A pass?” I asked. “A mountain pass?” Ah, yes. A pass.

But then, there was a moment of consideration by my translators, as they considered other meanings of the word, turned slightly red, and said “well, it also is used in other ways.”

Inappropriate, somewhat rude ways, apparently. They were warning me to be careful in the use of the simple word “col,” but hoped to leave it at that.

“So the signs are pointing toward passes between mountains, but better not to use the word.”

They nodded and smiled. Disaster averted.

Later that morning I found myself sharing my binoculars and camera with a small troupe of children. Le Rimlishof hosts school children for environmental exploration during the week, then church groups for retreats on weekends. While we were there, a large group of French school children spent time running up and down the side of the mountain, then an energetic German church arrived for campfires, cookouts, and lots of intergenerational play.

A smaller group of children and adults stay on through all the program changes: a handful of refugee families, some from Kosovo, the others, I think, from Somalia. Maki, Makfirete and Jojo were interested in my binoculars, so I showed them how to use them then took their picture and shared it with them on my digital camera. That led to more photos, some energetic jumping from rocks, and numerous attempts to communicate. When I tried to speak French to them, Makfirete, a sturdy girl of seven or eight, said “No English!” When I tried to say I was speaking French, she shrugged and said again “No English!”

We did manage to count to ten together – badly, since Jojo and Maki are still at the age when seven can easily follow five, and my pronunciation of “quatre” and “cinque” left Makfirete shaking her head. While we were counting, laughing, and documenting their amazing jumps, a German couple came up the drive in search of a nearby address. They didn’t speak English, the children couldn’t understand their question in German, and their mothers, when coaxed from the nearby kitchen, made clear that they spoke neither French, English, or German.

What a wonder it must have been, on that Pentecost day two thousand years ago, for the disciples to speak and find that those around them understood. And to know that the meaning was intact – to know that the Spirit, in guiding the language, was speaking straight to the hearts of the listeners.

An Adventures in Mission team a young friend took part in had a similar experience in Peru. A team of young adults was trained to do street ministry – drama, worship, and an offer to pray for anyone in need of prayer. One of the young men of the group found himself praying in tongues in a way that seemed unfamiliar. When he finished, a man in the crowd told him he’d been speaking in that man’s language – a tribal language, one of over three-hundred languages in a country divided by mountains, deep valleys, and vast areas of jungle. The good news of Jesus took on new life, not just for the man who heard it in his language, but for all the listeners: God is near. He knows our language.

God knows our language, but do we know his?    

Colmar

After lunch on Pentecost Sunday, my husband and I traveled on from Le Rimlishof to Colmar, a historic town that has been the anchor of the Alsace region for centuries. According to Wikipedia, Colmar “was the location where Charles the Fat held a diet in 884.” It was an imperial city of the Holy Roman Empire, participant in the Protestant Reformation, occupied by Sweden during the Thirty Years' War, conquered by France under Louis XIV in 1673, annexed by the German Empire in 1871 as a result of the Franco-Prussian War. After World War I Colmar was returned to France, was occupied by Nazi Germany from 1940 to 1945, and has been French since 1945.

Wandering the narrow historic district of Colmar, we came to the Place de la Cathédrale, and headed toward the entrance of St. Martin’s, the Gothic church built in the thirteenth century over the remains of two earlier churches. We were stopped at the door by a man asking for something: “petite pence”? Our attempts to understand him, or to have him understand us, went nowhere, until we said “Etats Unis.”

“Ah!” He motioned us toward another man, sitting on the ground, who looked up at us and then spat on the ground. Meaning broke through – they were beggars, asking for change. We shook our heads and pushed through the door to find a service in progress inside the grand gothic space.

L'église Saint-Martin de Colmar

Solennité de la Pentecôte - Solemnity of Pentecost. A service of music, prayer, and eucharist totally familiar, with a reading from Acts 2, another from 1 Corinthians 12, and the repetition, together, of “Notre Père, qui êtes aux cieux, Que votre nom soit sanctifié.”

Toward the end of the service, we sang a familiar song, a song written in Latin about the time the church was built by Francis of Assisi, and set to music in Germany in the seventeenth century:

    All creatures of our God and King
    Lift up your voice and with us sing,
    Alleluia! Alleluia!
    Thou burning sun with golden beam,
   Thou silver moon with softer gleam!
   O praise Him! O praise Him!
   Alleluia! Alleluia! Alleluia!“

“Alleluia,” in French, is the same as in English. In fact, it seems one of the few words that holds true across almost every language, with slight changes in spelling and pronunciation, but no change in meaning.

Amazing to think there will be a day when all languages join in song, when all creation celebrates together, when the differences of speech and culture become part of the beauty, rather than points of frustration, or dangerous division:

   It's the song of the redeemed rising from the African plain.
   It's the song of the forgiven drowning out the Amazon rain,
   the song of Asian believers filled with God's holy fire.
   It's every tribe, every tongue, every nation, a love song born of a grateful choir.
   It's all God's children singing, "Glory, glory, hallelujah, He reigns. He reigns."

   Let it rise above the four winds, caught up in the heavenly sound.
   Let praises echo from the towers of cathedrals to the faithful gathered underground.
   Of all the songs sung from the dawn of creation, some were meant to persist.
   Of all the bells rung from a thousand steeples, none rings truer than this.
   All God's children singing, "Glory, glory, hallelujah, He reigns. He reigns, He reigns."
   All God's children singing, "Glory, glory, hallelujah, He reigns. He reigns, He reigns."

               (He Reigns,  Peter Furler and Steve Taylor, c 2003 Ariose Music)

 Please join the conversation. Your thoughts and experiences in this are welcome. Look for the "__ comments" link below to leave your comments.