Thesis (M.S.)--University of Michigan, 1998. / Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (M.S.)--University of Michigan, 1998. / Includes bibliographical references.

Author's name: Magdalena Hošková School: Charles University in Prague, Faculty of Arts Department: Institute of Linguistics and Finno-Ugric Studies Title: Spells as a Part of Finnish Folklore Supervisor: Mgr. Jan Dlask, Ph.D. Number of pages: 77 Key words: spell, Finnish spells, Finnish folklore, Kalevala, Finnish mythology, tietäjä, shaman, prayer, healing magic, homoeopathic magic, John Abercromby, James Frazer, neoshamanism, neopaganism This thesis deals with spells as a part of Finnish folklore. It depicts the circumstances of the spells' genesis, as well as their structural features and different purposes of their use. It is considered that most spells were created during the era of late paganism and early Christianity. This is true not only of Finland but also of Europe in general. The thesis also analyses the role of the shaman as the spiritual leader of Finnish people living in the era before the spells' creation and thereafter analyses the role of the shaman's successor: the tietäjä, the charmer who created spells and used them to help people in his community. So the tietäjä used his spells for the same purpose as his predecessor, the shaman, used trance states, which he entered via drumming, chanting and dancing. In the trance state, he talked to animal spirits and ancestors' spirits and...

This diploma thesis examines a phenomenon of the contemporary Finnish fantastic literature that seems to conquer the Finnish book market, also crossing the boarders and coming to the Czechia as well - Finnish Weird, or suomikumma. The aim of this work is to determine the reception of the Finnish Weird within the audience of the Czech readers. The theoretical part focuses on the fantastic literature and the position of Finnish Weird in it. The reader-response theory and the term horizon of expectations coined by Hans Robert Jauss provide the interpretation of how readers perceive the fantastic literature and what they expect from it. Works of the Finnish Weird fiction translated in Czech and responses of Czech readers are presented in the main part of the thesis. The research material is based on comments and reviews of the Czech readers published predominantly on the internet and on the internet book databases. Key words: contemporary Finnish literature, reader-response theory, horizon of expectation, genre, science fiction, fantasy, horor, speculative fiction, Weird, New Weird, Finnish Weird

This master's thesis deals with the influence of The Kalevala and the Finnish language on the English writer John Ronald Reuel Tolkien and his work. The main purpose is to provide a possibly most complex description of The Kalevala's influence on Tolkien. Firstly, the background of The Kalevala, the role of Elias Lönnrot during its birth and its importance, and secondly, Tolkien, his work and his discovery of The Kalevala are introduced. The main part of the thesis focuses on Tolkien's inspiration by The Kalevala out of three different perspectives. The first one is the influence of the Finnish language on Quenya, one of Tolkien's fictional languages. The second one is The Kalevala's importance for Tolkien from a general point of view - especially the influence of Lönnrot's role, The Kalevala's mythology, several abstract aspects of The Kalevala led by the importance of singing and The Kalevala's structure is crucial. The third one is Tolkien's inspiration by The Kalevala from a concrete point of view. Particularly the importance of The Kalevala's character Väinämöinen and the story of the Sampo is significant here.

The aim of this study is to investigate the syntax in Finnish literature for young people in order to arrive at fundamental information about the character of the language in literature of this kind. The corpus consists of three Tiina books by Anni Polva. My method is mainly quantitative, but also comparative. The language of the three books is compared, but the results of this comparison are also contrasted with other Finnish and also Swedish quantitative linguistic investigations. The investigation begins at the sentence and clause levels. To some extent is also considered whether syntactic features occur in main clauses or in subordinate clauses, in narrative text or in dialogues. The length of sentences and clauses is investigated. It appears that the length of sentences stated in clauses (2.2 clauses on averige) and the length of clauses in words (5 words on averige) do not differ from those typical of literature for children or adults. On the other hand the length of sentences stated in words (11 words on averige) is somewhat higher than in literature for children and adults. Active and passive clauses, mode, tense and negation in the clauses are investigated. The results show that the frequency of active clauses is high and the frequency of passive clauses is very low. The frequency of negated clauses is also very high. The most frequent mode is the indicative, followed by the conditional. There are few predicates in the imperative, and there are only isolated instances of predicates in the potential. The use of tenses resembles that in literature for children and adults: most predicates are in the past tense, followed by the present, the pluperfect and the perfect. Main clauses and subordinate clauses of different kinds are dealt with in the investigation. The proportion between main clauses and subordinate clauses is about the same as in the spoken language. The coordinating as well as the subordinating conjunctions are investigated both with regard to the actual occurrences of the conjunctions and with regard to their meanings. The most frequent coordi­nating conjunctions are ja 'and* (55.8 %) and multa 'but' (21.4 %). The classification of the conjunctions according to meaning shows that copulative conjunctions are the most frequent ones (50.7 %). Of the subordinating conjunctions että 'that' (35.7 %) and kun 'when, because' (25.0 %) are the most frequent ones. Semantically explicative conjunctions are the most frequent subordinating conjunctions (27.6 %). Syndetic coordination is most frequent in main clauses (78.8 %) as well as in subordinate clauses (98.9 %). Asyndetic coordination is clearly used as a stylistic device. A large number of different constructions are used in the corpus. Some of them are contracted clauses, some are other constructions which resemble them. The frequency of these constructions is unexpectedly high. The most frequent types of contracted clause are the necessive construction (47.9 %), the participle construction (18.3 %) and the temporal construction (15.3 %). Of the other constructions the modal construction (60.4 %) and the agent construction (12.8 %) are the most frequent ones. The structure of the sentences in the Tiina books is varied and sometimes complex. In all there are 167 different combinations of clauses in the corpus. The most frequent type of sentence consists of one main clause (27.8 %). In the combination of clauses we also find clauses with different degrees of subordination. Grade 1 is the most frequent one (87.1 %). However, there are even instances of grade 4. The position of main clauses and subordinate clauses varies a great deal. They may be mixed at will. The corpus contains a large number of clause combinations which occur once only. / digitalisering@umu

published_or_final_version / Education / Master / Master of Education

The goal of this thesis is twofold. Firstly, it investigates the actual, native use of spatial-deictic demonstratives in Japanese, Finnish and Swedish. Secondly, it investigates and elucidates the interlanguage of Finnish-speaking and Swedish-speaking learners of Japanese regarding their use of Japanese spatial-deictic demonstratives in the light of respective native use and, in comparison to the descriptions of demonstratives in the teaching materials used. Thus, the present study deals with analyses of two sets of empirical data: data produced by native-speaking informants (L1 data) and data produced by language learners (L2 data). These were elicited by Discourse Completion Tasks (DCTs) designed, collected and analyzed using both quantitative and qualitative methods by the author. The results showed that the actual use of demonstratives by the native informants was not always in accordance with the way described in grammars. The typological similarities between Japanese and Finnish were in this study not reflected in the native use of demonstratives, and some uses were not solely based on the spatial relations between the referent, the speaker and the addressee, but rather on social-interactional factors. The main findings regarding the learner data revealed some differences in the usage rate of the demonstratives between the two Finnish-speaking groups and the one Swedish-speaking learner group studied. There were, however, no particular differences found between them regarding the type of demonstrative used. It is suggested that these differences are first and foremost connected both with the teaching materials used and the more or less heterogeneous linguistic environment in which the learners reside, and only thereafter with the typological similarities or differences between their respective native languages, Finnish and Swedish, and the target language, Japanese. It is further argued that the learners’ use of the different Japanese demonstratives, that is the type of demonstrative used, could be explained in terms of familiarity with the grammar. That is, when the situations used in the DCTs were exemplified in teaching materials and were familiar to them, the learners seemed to use Japanese demonstratives as they are described in the teaching materials and as the native Japanese speakers use them. When the situations used in the DCTs were not exemplified in the teaching materials, the learners seem to rely more on their native language. The results, thus, suggest that the learners’ interlanguage is influenced by the grammar of the target language known to the learners, but also by the number of languages (or varieties) that the learners have contact with at the time of learning. The results of the present study have implications for the teaching of Japanese in at least two ways. Firstly, the importance of grammar instruction must be emphasized since its effect on the learners’ language is apparent. Secondly, the contents of teaching materials should be revised on the basis of the native speakers’ actual use of the grammar.

This thesis deals with place-names in the southern part of the municipality of Skellefteå in the province of Västerbotten, more precisely the parishes of Bureå, Burträsk and Lövånger. It consists of three different sections, first a survey of the settlement names in each parish, then a section on the second elements in these place-names, and finally a study of names of more recent settlements. The earliest place-names here are names like Blacke, Bureå, Bäck, Kräkånger and Lövånger. The second elements in the names from the medieval expansion period are mark, böle, byn, träsk, sjön and vattnet. Placenames of Nordic, Sami and Finnish origin are found in Skellefteå. The name Lossmen has its origin in Ume Sami and was then borrowed into Finnish. Originally Sami names are Gorkuträsk, Jäppnästjärnliden, Lubboträsk, Sittuträsk and Tavträskliden. The thesis consists of interpretations of the names on parishes, villages, farms and summer pastures, and in Bureå and Lövånger also the names of seasonal fishing stations. The second major section deals with the second elements included in village names, alternative village names, names of parts of villages and farm names. Here the second elements in place-names in Bureå, Burträsk and Lövånger are accounted for, as are the names in the parishes of Byske, Jörn and Skellefteå. This is followed by a discussion of the second elements in Västerbotten and quite often in other parts of Norrland as well. The third major section consists of an analysis of the names of recent settlements in the area. These were established from the 1730s and up to 1870. Founding settlements was a way of providing livelihoods for a rapidly growing population. The study comprises 726 names, of which 269 are in the primary area of investigation, the parishes of Bureå, Burträsk and Lövånger. Extensive comparisons are made continually with conditions in the parishes of Byske, Jörn and Skellefteå in the northern area. The aim of the study is to determine in greater detail what characterises the names of more recent settlements in the municipality of Skellefteå in terms of categories of settlement names, their frequency and distribution within the area. A comparison is also made between Skellefteå and the municipality of Vännäs (Hagervall 1986). One of Hagervall’s findings is that many names are not based on existing features. This thesis shows, however, hardly any cases of stereotype naming in Västerbotten and that in nearly all cases the names refer to features.

This thesis examines fragmentary Finnish in Late Old Swedish charters (c. 1350–1526) issued in the Finnish part of the Swedish realm, the diocese of Åbo. Consisting mostly of proper names, albeit occasionally displaying Finnish inflectional and derivational morphology, these fragments have previously not generally been regarded as representing actual written Finnish, but rather as onomastic loans or transcriptions of oral language by more or less monolingual Swedish scribes. This thesis attempts a description and analysis of the Swedish–Finnish language mixture, to see to what extent the embedding of Finnish segments in these Swedish-language charters can be said to reflect scribal proficiency in Finnish or a lack thereof. The thesis relies on theoretical and empirical findings in the fields of code-switching and historical sociolinguistics. To provide a socio-historical context for the linguistic analysis, sociolinguistic conditions in medieval Finland and the textual genre of medieval charters are outlined. The bilingual segments in the data are then described and compared with models of code-switching from modern studies, to see whether their form corresponds to patterns that could be expected of more or less balanced bilinguals. The choice between Swedish and Finnish linguistic variants is also considered in the light of textual and sociolinguistic factors, and a study is made of Finnish grammatical transfer in the scribal Swedish of medieval Finland. Although the scarcity of the medieval data does not allow definite conclusions, the tentative results reveal a language mixture that is mainly well formed, though limited in scope and with some instances of scribal errors that could be due to a lack of proficiency in Finnish. On the other hand, the insertion of Finnish segments shows a stylistic patterning that suggests a linguistic awareness on the part of the scribes, and the choice of Swedish prepositions in certain constructions differs quantitatively from the norm in non-Finnish parts of medieval Sweden, in a way that can partly be attributed to the influence of Finnish locative case semantics. While it is apparent that proficiency levels in Finnish must have varied somewhat among medieval scribes in Finland, the results point to a more or less bilingual proficiency, or at least extensive passive knowledge of Finnish.