I appreciate your mini-treatise on Finnish-Swedish relations, as well as Lars's comments. When you say "On the other hand similar differences and potential intuitive misunderstandings exist within both Sweden and
to a lesser degree Finland, as well as UK," how closely do you mean to draw an analogy between the UK and I presume Ireland, Scotland, and Wales with historical relations between Finland and Sweden? The non-English British countries were brutally suppressed by England for many centuries and their relationship has been far more destructive than constructive.
I have a story for you of Finnish interest. A friend of my father's is of Finnish origin. His mother was born early in the century somewhere in Finland near the Russian border. She remembered traveling as a girl with her mother across a frozen lake seeking the services of the only doctor in the area, who happened to be on the Russian side. When she was six or seven, her family emigrated to the U.S. where her father was able to find work in the copper mines in the Upper Peninsula of the state of Michigan. Many Finns came to work in the mines. I'm told that the characteristics of the countryside and climate resembled Finland's well and were a natural source of attraction to the immigrant Finns. On the few occasions I've traveled in that area, I've always been impressed by the number of Finnish place names. The names on the postal delivery boxes in front of country houses all seem to have Finnish sir names on them. Needless to say, Paavo Nurmi and his olympic accomplishments were greatly revered in the U.P., as we Americans refer to it. Later in life, one of her brothers, who was born after the family had settled in Michigan, for whom Finnish was his first language, made his first and only trip to Finland as a curiosity and discovered, much to his amazement, that he couldn't understand a word of Finnish as it is spoken in Finland. (This was in the 1970's) The dialect of Finnish spoken in the U.P. had diverged from what one might call the Queen's Finnish to a degree that speakers of one strain of Finnish were incomprehensible to the other. Indeed, not only could he not understand the Finnish he heard in Finland, Finns he met could not understand him. Much to his disillusionment, he had to settle for communicating in English. Did you know that so many Finnish communities sprouted up in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan and remain to this day? |
