How Little Hancock, Michigan Became a Big Deal: This Year's Finno-Ugric Capital of Culture
Artwork by Minna Sundberg. Check out her comic Stand Still, Stay Silent Many people recognize that the word sauna is a Finnish word, both a noun and a verb, that denotes the specific kind of bathing enshrined in a wooden hut heated by a stove. In Swedish, bada bastu , means to bathe ( bada ) in the bath ( ba d ) hut ( stu ga ) . The Swedish word bad is more similar to the English word bath than it is to the the Finnish word sauna . That's because Swedish and English have grown from the same ancient Indo-European branch on the theoretical language family tree . The Finnish language, as portrayed by Finnish comic book artist Minna Sundberg , is a lonely cat among Swedish and the other Nordic languages, an outlier with no one to rub up against and purr. Well, as we recently learned, that is very much not true. A language family gathering on Hancock's Quincy Street Green Despite the fact that five million Finnish speakers seem alone, wedged between Indo-European la...
