Suomen suot - Finnish bogs

Yes! Suomen suot. Excellent topic. In our class, we're interested in all sorts of aspects of Finland, but I'm sure none of us ever expected to find ourselves studying this subject. And it's a major subject if you think about it; it's only natural that a low lying country with all those lakes will naturally also have a wide variety of wetlands. I think it came about because Neil had just been telling us about a typically stressful encounter with Finland's summer insect life. Insects which thrive thanks to all those wetlands.

Anyway, Sami found us an interesting short video all about the different sorts of wetland on the YLE site, and here's the link - Suomen eri suotyypit. As you can see, although we have all sorts of words for boggy places in English, Finnish has even more. In my usual lazy way, I tried the text on that page on Google Translate. In my defence, Google Translate has really improved in dealing with Finnish since the early days; but on this occasion it came up with utter gibberish. We're dealing with very specialised vocabulary here! Here's a list: korpisuo, letto, lähteikkö, luhta, neva, räme...

On a different topic entirely, we also had a look at another YLE article, in which people had been asked for the words which best expressed Finnishness, under the heading Kalsarikännit, löyly, sisu, perkele - Tässäkö suomalaisuuden syvimmät sanat? There's the link for you - clearly a question which can start arguments!