January 19, 2023: Metamorph(ology)osis -

Lately, I find myself telling or showing things to friends who already know (or know more than I do) about them. My news is not new. My paintings of real places are inaccurate. My amazing discoveries were the topic of recent podcasts.

I have a name for what my friends are, in these situations. They are pre-edified. I cannot edify them, because they are edified already.

One Linguistics assignment this week was to list words we encountered that were new (at least, new to us). We were to note where they occurred, and whether we created them ourselves, or just stumbled across them.

You won’t be surprised that I was making words up all the time. (Pre-edified, for instance. You might argue that it’s not a word, and arguing is your right and privilege – we’ve been doing “what is a word?” for two weeks now. Come on down!)

Anyway, I am sharing my favorite revelation of the week, which is about something you can do in Finnish but not in English (and vice versa). You may get new words out of this -- OR NOT, because you may be pre-edified.

In Finnish, there are a lot of grammatical cases: ten to fifteen, depending on how you feel about the cases labelled “marginal.” The cases get formed by putting different endings onto words. Those endings mostly do things we English speakers do with prepositions, but since in Finnish they are attached to the ends of words, they are called POSTpositions. If you put one ending on the word “house,” it means you went INTO the house. If you put a different ending on “house,” it means you turned something INTO a house (like, oh, maybe you started with a shipping container, or a cardboard box).

(The “went into” case is the illative case, and the “turned into” case is the translative, covering transformations. That’s what I love: it covers transformations.)

So in Finnish it’s easy to differentiate the “into” that means going into some place, versus the “into” that means turning something into something else, transforming it.   

And what can you do in English, but not in Finnish? I discovered this one all by myself! We didn’t talk about it in class! You can tell the joke:

Can you make me a sandwich?

Okay, (waves imaginary wand) you’re a sandwich!

(There’s a silent, transformative  “into” that might be hiding in “make me a sandwich,” but in Finnish, you’d give it away by the case ending, whereas in English, it’s Heisenberg’s “Into,” there and not there.)

I am informed that you can’t make the joke in German either, which seems Germanic, but what do I know?  I am also informed that the joke is dumb, but the person lobbing that criticism really needed a sandwich.