[hackerspaces] languages! Re: Translating word 'hackerspace' to other ... ?

[Stewart Dickson]

  When I attended ImagINA'1991, I met there a guy named Antti Kari from 
Helsinki University.
For some reason, there happened to be hanging on the wall a geographical 
taxonomy of languages.
Antti said, "Here, you see, Finnish is not related to any other 
language, except maybe Hungarian, but not really."
http://www.pnas.org/content/85/23/9370.full.pdf
https://genographic.nationalgeographic.com/genographic/index.html

German and English have a common root;  French, Italian, Spanish and 
Portuguese should be inter-translated only through Latin;   Slavic 
languages should be translated through Greek.

This is a lot of what Google | Translate gets wrong -- I think it tries 
to translate everything through English.

Finnish branches directly off of the base root -- Proto-Canaanite?  
Sumerian??

-Stewart

On 8/28/10 9:03 AM, Chris Weiss wrote:
> this may be way to obvious, but since you didn't mention it, what's
> the finnish word for a hacker, or what is the type of person usually
> called?
>
> And does it have to be 1 word?  on a pure technical standpoint,
> "hackerspace" is an abuse of English, it should be 2 words, but it
> being a sort of proper noun allows the liberty to taken and accepted.
>
> I don't know the first thing about finnish, but a quick play with a
> english-finnish dictionary lead me to hakka paikka which, in my head,
> has a nice alliteration to it
>
> another option would be to take it apart and back to the roots, maybe
> as far back as latin, and see if you can bring it forward to finnish
> in a sensible way.
>

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