Thursday Things of Interest

I guess most of you now know the basics of Finland through the emojis I have used the last two challenges. This time I leave the emojis and concentrate on more concrete issues, with special interest to wars and wargames. Let's start from the basics. While you all are going through historical sources and try to figure out what in the world is "Ensimmäinen konekiväärikomppania*", I'll help you.

Many of the Finnish words are quite easy for English speakers, since many of the words are borrowed from English. Or Swedish. Or German. Maybe from Russian. "Pistooli" and "revolveri" are easy, they mean pistol and revolver. Kivääri is more complicated, it comes from Swedish "gevär", which comes from old German "gewehr", and means rifle.

Things get even more complicated next. For example "konekivääri" means machine gun and "konepistooli" is submachine gun. "Kone" means machine, so Finnish konekivääri is actually "machine rifle" and konepistooli is "machine pistol". On the other hand you might like to translate machine gun as "konetykki", because gun is "tykki" (especially when you are talking about The Guns of the Navarone type of guns), but that would be wrong. Finnish has a word "konetykki", but it means cannon, and that comes from German again.

I guess all the confusion is now gone?

And here is one of the most well known and important Finnish inventions, "Suomi-konepistooli". Suomi is Finland in Finnish and you already know what konepistooli means.

*The First Machine Gun Company

--- In Other News ---

We have couple of entries for today, it is -5 degrees Celcius here in Finland and we have a little bit of snow.