Female Finn Twins Just Can't Win

Virpi Lummaa's interest in Finland's copious church records is purely statistical.

The 33-year-old Finnish biologist, aided by genealogists, has pored through centuries-old tomes (and microfiche) for birth, marriage and death records, which ended up providing glimpses of evolution at work in humanity's recent ancestors. Among them: that male twins disrupt the mating potential of their female siblings by prenatally rendering them more masculine; mothers of sons die sooner than those of daughters, because rearing the former takes a greater toll; and grandmothers are important to the survival of grandchildren. [Link]

A Finnish Conspiracy

Why do I love Finland? Because it was the birthplace of my mother's grandparents, but also because the Finnish language is pleasing to the ear, and yet delightfully incomprehensible. I have long suspected that the Finns pad words with extra syllables just to confound foreigners (according to the rules of Finnish grammar, words can be arbitrarily long). Now it seems that my suspicion has been confirmed.

Markku Uusipaavalniemi is a member of the Finnish curling team competing at Torino—nicknamed "U-15" for the number of letters in his last name.

One of the highlights at the 2000 World Championships in Glasgow, Scotland, was when the crowd did the old spelling cheer: "Give me a U, give me a U, give me an S ... and so on through all 15 letters in his surname. When they finally finished and asked, "What does it spell?" the stadium went silent. On the meaning of his name, Uusipaavalniemi says "Uusi" means "new" and "niemi" means "peninsula," but the middle part doesn't mean anything. [Link]

[tagged: genealogy]

Let's Skip the Peasantries

From The New York Times:

Arts, Briefly

Compiled by LAWRENCE VAN GELDER
Published: December 9, 2005

[snip]

Sibelius Diaries Published

Diaries kept by the Finnish national composer Jean Sibelius from 1909 to 1944 have been published for the first time, Agence France-Presse reported. Seen previously by only a handful of researchers, the diaries cover his relationships with friends and family, publishers and economic matters. They reveal his anger at poor reviews and his disappointment at being unable to find one aristocrat among his ancestors. Sibelius (1865-1957) was particularly irate when genealogists traced his ancestry to Finnish peasants.

[snip]

[Read the whole story]

I had the same reaction when I learned that two of my great-grandparents were Finnish peasants. My other great-grandparents had the good sense to be French-Canadian and American peasants.