Bloomsday yesterday. After the entertainments at O'Malley's, one of the local Irish pubs, the evening degenerated into general pub nonsense, with (for instance) the Finns round the table trying to list the seventeen cases for nouns in our peculiar language, unrelated to almost any other. We were stumped at around thirteen - fourteen, although I am sure I can smoothly and effortlessly use each and every one of them in speech and writing. One of my pals came up with a Finnish word he uses to stun foreigners with: hääyöaie, wedding night intention. Seven vowels in a row, what a beauty (please note y is always a vowel in Finnish: purse your lips to whistle, then make a sound like the oo in too, or ui in suit). Much later in the night, we were told the author John Irving, currently promoting his latest book in Helsinki , had just left he pub. I read and liked Hotel New Hampshire as a teenager.
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hey, seventeen cases! jeez, i thought there were only five! well, i can only remember five from latin: nominative, accusative, genitive, dative, ablative, i have not thought of this for 25 yrs, but the latin teacher obviously drummed it well into us, he used to bring his dog to school and kept it in the storeroom, it was a big storeroom . . . john irving is one of those writers i feel i should like but have never really got into, but i wouldn't mind bumping into him in a pub, i think he would be jovial & sociable.
Hei nmj, yeah, there are a lot more to Finnish: partitive, translative, essive, adessive, allative, inessive, elative, illative, etc ad infinitum et nauseam. As to John Irving, I think he is actually rather entertainmenty and less literary, you know what I mean? But I was bummed to find I missed bumping into him at the pub all the same.
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