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Comment by vram22 | Hacker News Reader

Interesting, that site says his background is actually Swedish(-speaking, at least).

>Born Linus Benedict Torvalds on December 28, 1969 in Helsinki, Finland, Torvalds is the son of journalists Ana and Nils Torvalds who belong to the Swedish-speaking minority.

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Big difference between Swedish and -speaking. Swedish speaking Finns typically identify as just that: Finns who happen to speak Swedish.

It's a bit like calling someone from Quebec "French".

Didn't know it, thanks. Agree with the Quebec thing.

When I visited Finland for this year's Worldcon (SF convention) I learned that all Finns learn Finnish and Swedish, the two official languages of Finland. Knowing some German, I found the Swedish street signs more helpful than the Finnish ones!

Yes, since Swedish is a Germanic language, I suppose. I know a bit of German too, and have noticed that when I read words in Scandinavian languages, I can sometimes guess what they mean, due to their being similar to corresponding German words.

Had been reading on Wikipedia about different human languages and their backgrounds and histories a while ago, and was interested to see that Finnish and Hungarian had stuff in common. They are both Uralic family languages according to Wikipedia.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finnish_language

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hungarian_language

You also appear to know English, another Germanic language.

English has been widely influenced by French after William the Conquerer and the Normands rule over England for almost 4 centuries.

Take a look at Beowulf and good luck trying to understand the original germanic version of English. You won't.

There is a whole branch of the conlang (constructed language) community that is interested in what English would be like if it hadn't been manhandled by Norman French. Science Fiction writer Poul Anderson wrote an essay in which he tried to use as few non-Anglo-Saxon words as possible, using calques from German where necessary. The result is sometimes said to be in "Anders-Saxon". The essay[1] is fun to read and has a Wikipedia page [2]. A friend said it was like reading one of the Norse sagas.

[1] https://groups.google.com/forum/message/raw?msg=alt.language...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncleftish_Beholding

Sorry if this is way too much topic drift from Supercomputers!

Ha, good one. In fact I had mentioned in a thread about Berlin startups on HN a while ago, that knowing English helped me a bit with guessing the meaning of some German words, since the two cultures have some common historical and cultural background.

My Hungarian friend finds the link to Finnish hard to hear or see, but some Finns I spoke to said that when they visit Hungary, they hear it, more in the rhythms than in actual words.

A lot of Finns speak Swedish as their mother tongue

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swedish-speaking_population_of...

Including Sibelius and Jansonn.

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