The Definite Article

Ange, Tomo and Maya

PR

I'm working on version 2.0 of a product which had its 1.0 release this week . There's been some nice publicity so far, including articles at the BBC, the Guardian, Wired News, and a technology feature in last Monday's Financial Times.

18 March 2004

P: C'mon, come to the gig tomorrow night. It'll be fun.
H: But it's the end of "Sex and the City" tomorrow night (pause, horrified look) ... I can't believe I just said that!

Tens of things

Last week, after a full day in our windowless room, Sarah and I decided to go for a walk. She had been wanting to see the sea so I took her down to where one of the peninsulas meet the harbour, near Kaapeli.

As we got closer to the water I could tell it was all iced over, but you should have seen my face when I saw that there were footprints tracking over the harbour's surface. Fantastic! I never would have expected that you could actually walk on the ice. Soon enough a woman walked towards us, walking her dog. The next day I found that the ice is used as a supplement to summer-time transport. People walk on it, buses drive on it, it's an auxiliary system that just happens to be dormant some months of the year. Since I started spending time in Helsinki, I've had quite a few expectations about the Nordic winter overturned, and this was another one: something I would've expected to be a hindrance to transport actually enhanced it.

Minna and Olli advised us that we would be safe to walk on it if there were "tens" of people there, but then we shouldn't walk in the "obviously" dangerous places. "Like where the ships go". Knowing that I'm quite naive about the dangers a Nordic environment can hold (watch me slip on the ice and sink into the sludge puddles), I think I'll wait to be guided by a Finn before I take an ice walk.

As an aside, I love expressions like "tens of people". I love feeling as though I have an insight into ways other languages work. For example, in English, you'd probably say something like "unless there are lots of people there", rather than "unless you see a few dozen people there". The latter is closer to "tens", but would feel overly specific for the context. So it's not a huge conceptual leap between expressions, but still I find the subtle differences to be amusing and interesting.

Of course, it's difficult for me to understand exactly what the similarities and differences are in the concepts without either learning Finnish myself, or cornering a Finnish person and boring them to death with my questions. And I am aware of the issues of cultural stereotyping, etc, involved (there are papers, books, undergraduate subjects about this) but I wade in anyway and just try to keep my nose clean.