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Comment by kqr | Hacker News Reader

Today I learned what a kenning is. I have encountered them many times before (to a foreigner, Finnish seems chock full of them) but I never knew they had a name. I love them!

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Kennings are different from normal compound words (which Finnish as a synthetic language is full of, like German). They're poetic/metaphorical synonyms for existing standard words for things, whereas something like tietokone (lit. "knowledge machine") is the standard Finnish word for computer. There's actually no kenning tradition in Finnish, it's more of an Old Norse thing.

As an aside, a fun exercise (for some values of fun) is to come up with English compound words that are not compound in Finnish. The first one that comes to mind is "lighthouse" – "majakka" (borrowed from Russian маяк).

That's why I qualified with "seems" "to a foreigner"! I know tail-star (comet), ice-cupboard (fridge), fire-stick (match), etc. are real words, but since I read them as their literal translations into my language, they become kennings in my brain.

Yeah, that’s fair.

The compound for the Finnish computer reminds me of a whole bunch from different languages, but I do enjoy Mandrian's "electric brain" as computer and "shadow box" for TV.

I think sähköaivo "electric brain" was also one of the words used in Finnish back in the 50s, before there was a standard word for computers.

But my favorite neologism for "computer" is probably the Icelandic tölva, a portmanteau of the words tala (number) and völva (a prophetess in Norse mythology).

Ooo! As a big fan of the sagas, I like that very much! Thank you for sharing.

First there was kerning, then there was keming, now there's kenning. When will the madness stop.

I think we also need kenming and kemning at a minimum.

Kenminimuming?

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