Languagle #33: Finnish
Ahkeruus kovan onnen voittaa
"Diligence beats bad luck."
What it means
Hard work outlasts bad luck. However unlucky you are, persistence will get you through in the end. It sits close to 'sisu', the Finnish idea of determination in the face of adversity.
How to say it
AH-ke-roos KO-van ON-nen VOIT-taa
Finnish always stresses the first syllable. Double letters are held twice as long, like the uu, nn and tt here, and that length can change what a word means.
Word by word
- Ahkeruus AH-ke-roos: diligence, hard work
- kovan KO-van: hard
- onnen ON-nen: luck (onni, luck)
- voittaa VOIT-taa: beats, wins against
Kova onni, 'hard luck', is the Finnish way of saying bad luck.
Where it was found
Finnish calls a proverb a sananlasku. This one is from Finnish Wikiquote's list of Finnish proverbs.
Similar sayings
- Latin: Labor omnia vincit. Hard work conquers everything. A line from the Roman poet Virgil.
How to recognise Finnish
Finnish uses ä and ö, and is full of double vowels and double consonants: aa, ää, uu, kk, tt. Native Finnish words never use b, c, f, q, w, x or z, and many words end in a vowel or -n. Estonian, its close relative, also has õ and ü and often drops the final vowel. Hungarian, a distant cousin, looks nothing like either, with ő, ű, sz and cs.
About the Finnish language
Finnish is a Uralic language spoken by around 5 million people in Finland, with a minority in Sweden. It is not Indo-European: its close relatives include Estonian and Karelian, and it is distantly related to Hungarian. Finnish has around fifteen noun cases, no grammatical gender and no word for 'he' or 'she' separately, just 'hän'. Its spelling is very regular: each letter stands for one sound, and long sounds are written double.
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