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The Protestant Reformation began in Germany in 1517, and the adoption of Lutheranism was the decisive impetus for literary development in Finland. As the Reformation required the use of the vernacular in services and ecclesiastical ceremonies, new manuals and biblical translations were needed urgently. The first Finnish books were produced by Mikael Agricola. He was born an ordinary son of a farmer, but his dedication to his studies opened up the road to leading roles in the Finnish Church. He was able to bring a total of nine works in Finnish to print, which became the foundation of literary Finnish. The first chapter outlines the historical background necessary to understand the life’s w...
Jason Lavery examines the Reformation in the Diocese of Turku during the reign of King Gustav Vasa (r. 1523-1560). This diocese, covering a territory better known then and now as Finland, encompassed the Swedish kingdom east of the Gulf of Bothnia. The Reformation in Finland was driven by King Gustav Vasa’s state-building program, sometimes referred to as “royal reform” in respect to the church, as well as the spread of Lutheran theology and practice. Both royal and Lutheran reform were mutually reinforcing and dependent upon one another.
The volume has two main issues. One focuses on Mikael Agricola and his contribution to reformation in Finland and the Finnish language. The corresponding articles are Heidi Salmi, German Influence on the Finnish in Mikael Agricola, Jyrki Knuutila, The Impact of the Reformation on Finland from the Perspective of Finnish Students at Wittenberg University (1531–1633), and Andreas Pawlas, Mikael Agricola and the Finnish Identity. Is Mikael Agricola the root for the special link between Finland and Germany when it comes to culture and language? Kirsti Siitonen and Katri Annika Wessel contribute a report on the teaching and research of Finnish language and culture in German universities. The fir...
of those problems in law which we inherit and/or retrieve in order to reconstruct and interpret in the light of legal semiotics, however defined. In addition to three main areas of underlying metaphysical assumptions there are also three main areas of possible editorial focus and these should be mentioned. The three areas of focus are: 1) the state-of-the-art of legal semiotics; 2) the dynamic, intense and exceptionally interactive quality of conference participation, and 3) the content of the papers presented which is the material of this volume. My choice of this triad of focal possibilities is to exclude the last since the papers speak for themselves and need but a brief reportorial capti...
This study offers a new perspective on unusual and unsettling experiences that are often interpreted as “mental illnesses” and on the techniques through which literary representations invite readerly responses and engagement. The book examines how four Finnish modernist writers, Helvi Hämäläinen, Jorma Korpela, Timo K. Mukka, and Maria Vaara, construct experiences of shattering and distress as bodily experiences that are embedded in the social and material world and entangled with social and cultural norms that govern subjectivity, gender, and sexuality. Drawing on narrative theory, theories of embodied cognition, phenomenology of illness, and feminist theory, the analyses show how literary works can invite readers to respond emotionally and to reflect on our views of the human mind and its interaction with the world. The book sheds light on the fictional portrayals and techniques of representation and on the ethics of narrating and reading about painful experiences. It also illuminates the ways the mind, body, consciousness, and mental distress are discussed in Finnish modernist literature and situates the texts in the international modernist tradition.
Versification describes the marriage of language and poetic form through which poetry is produced. Formal principles, such as metre, alliteration, rhyme, or parallelism, take precedence over syntax and prosody, resulting in expressions becoming organised as verse rather than prose. The aesthetic appeal of poetry is often linked to the potential for this process to seem mysterious or almost magical, not to mention the interplay of particular expressions with forms and expectations. The dynamics of versification thus draw a general interest for everyone, from enthusiasts of poetry or forms of verbal art to researchers of folklore, ethnomusicology, linguistics, literature, philology, and more. The authors of the works in the present volume explore versification from a variety of angles and in diverse cultural milieus. The focus is on metrics in practice, meaning that the authors concentrate not so much on the analysis of the metrical systems per se as on the ways that metres are used and varied in performance by individual poets and in relationship to language.
Language contact phenomena have been researched throughout the history of the discipline, but the intensity of the research has undoubtedly risen during the last decades due to growing globalization. This peer-reviewed volume presents twelve papers from the Second Conference on Language Contact in Times of Globalization (University of Groningen, June 2009) which deal with a wide range of topics, languages and contact situations. Five of them involve a Finno-Ugric language (Saami-Komi-Russian; Finnic-Baltic; Mordvin-Turkic; Estonian-German; Saami general), two a Slavic language (Slavic-Romance; Slavic general), two Germanic-Romance contact and three situations outside Europe (The Arabic World...
Songs and writings: oral and literary cultures in early-modern Finland renews the understanding of exchange between the learned culture of clergymen and the culture of commoners, or “folk”. What happened when the Reformation changed the position of the oral vernacular language to literary and ecclesiastical, and when folk beliefs seem to have become an object for more intensive surveillance and correction? How did clergymen understand and use the versatile labels of popular belief, paganism, superstition and Catholic fermentation? Why did they choose particular song languages, poetic modes and melodies for their Lutheran hymns and literary poems, and why did they avoid oral poetics in ce...
This accessible, hands-on text not only introduces students to the important topicsin historical linguistics but also shows them how to apply the methods described and how to thinkabout the issues; abundant examples and exercises allow students to focus on how to do historicallinguistics. Distinctive to this text is its integration of the standard topics with others nowconsidered important to the field, including syntactic change, grammaticalization, sociolinguisticcontributions to linguistic change, distant genetic relationships, areal linguistics, and linguisticprehistory. Examples are taken from a broad range of languages; those from the more familiarEnglish, French, German, and Spanish make the topics more accessible, while those fromnon-Indo-European languages show the depth and range of the concepts they illustrate.This secondedition features expanded explanations and examples as well as updates in light of recent work inlinguistics, including a defense of the family tree model, a response to recent claims on lexicaldiffusion/frequency, and a section on why languages diversify and spread.