A New Yorker in Finland
Matt Yglesias is in Finland right now, and putting up a series of posts on his observations. I invite any Finnish readers who see him around Helsinki to put their observations in the comments! Perhaps Yglesias should drop in on Jaakkeli’s office so he could be schooled on Finnish physics?
Is Finnish physics most similar to Jewish, German/Aryan or English physics? I hope it doesn’t have any of that quantum devilry in it.
It’s like Hungarian and Mordvin physics. Nobody can understand it, not even Finnish physicists.
Yglasias keeps referring to the Finns as “Nordic.” My understanding is that this is incorrect, am I wrong?
i thought they were nordic, but not scandinavian.
‘Nordic’ usually implies membership of the Indo-European language group, which is not the case with Finnish. ‘Scandinavian’ is a geographical term, which apparently has a narrower use confined to the Scandinavian Peninsula – just Norway and Sweden – and a wider use to include Denmark and Finland.
well, they might not be nordic, but they’re part of norden :-)
‘Nordic’ refers to citizens of Nordic countries, and that includes Sweden, Norway, Iceland, Denmark and Finland. ‘Scandinavia’ is – like David B said – a geographical term. ‘Nordic’ is kinda hard term for americans, since they mix it up with some racial aryan ideology, even if it only means northern European.
Fair enough: ‘Nordic’ probably now has this wider meaning. But I think the term was introduced (or at least popularised) by anthropologists and linguists (e.g. Max Muller) using it as a synonym for ‘North Germanic’ or ‘North Teutonic’. My copy of the Pocket Oford English Dictionary (7th edn.) gives the main meaning of ‘Nordic’ as ‘of the tall blond long-headed Germanic people of Scandinavia’. But this does now have a rather old-fashioned (not to say ominous) ring to it.
Now people should remember where they are. Most people don’t hang out at sites like GNXP and most people don’t give a shit about anthropology. In Finland people who insist that anthropological classification owns terms like Nordic are classified as Nazi creeps.
Finns don’t, of course, call themselves Nordic and neither do the Scandinavians. “Norden” just translates to “the north” and in Finnish the expression is “pohjoismaat”, “northern countries”. The stuff about “Nordic countries” is a shorthand that became convenient after the countries followed similar social models after WWII. It’s even official, we exist in a sort of a semi-union…
http://www.norden.org/
…a mini-EU, just with no meaningful powers but a lot of nice stuff for ordinary citizens (like the ease of migration between the countries). I wish the big EU was something similar.