Ah, Those Wonderful Finns!

Jim Griffin wrote in the sidebar at boingboing blog that Finland is a Teen-Ager, and I couldn’t agree more. I’m half Finnish and have never been to Finland, but have spoken to a lot of Finnish people both online and in person (the U.P. of Michigan has a fairly sizeable Finnish-heritage population), and my impression of Finland and Finnish people is how he says it is. For the most part, the people who live in Finland have all been really intelligent, educated people… they work hard (Americans by contrast do not even know what hard work *is*), they’re honest, they’ve evolved past the sex discrimination thing, and yet they don’t think they’re so great (but they are, they just don’t realize it yet).

What I’ve seen happen in the past ten years is that they are slowly becoming much more aware of how important their past is… today you can find several translations of the Kalevala, when only a decade ago, you’d be lucky to find anything in English… but they have not yet realized how much better off they are than most of the rest of the world. As a personal aside, my mother was the organizer of the very first Finn Fest here in the US back in the early 1980’s, and I got the chance to see first-hand a lot of the work that went into that (and yes, I did stuff envelopes!). Finn Fest is now a hugely successful event every year, and I’m glad to know that it will continue for many years to come. Suomi College in Hancock is now Finlandia University and the connections between here and there are firmly in place.

Online, one problem that remains unsolved is the lack of good translation capabilities. Nowhere can you find a babelfish for Finnish (afaik). The same is true for Irish, unfortunately (my other heritage half). I’ve looked for some sort of open-source app that I could use to build, at minimum, a cross-indexed (searchable in both directions) dictionary of Irish, but have, so far, been unsuccessful in finding anything that I’m capable of installing that would be accessible from the Web, and there is no way I want to try building a database from scratch. I’m still looking…