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"Please don't fell"

A film group of the epoch movie Härmä (Once Upon a Time in the North) left this sign behind in 2012. The tree is portrayed in the opening scene of the film (and I think it should have reappeared in the end, to close the cycle). It is a brilliant movie, though.

"Please don't fell" the sign says in local dialect - probably because the crew had rigorous training on the dialect at the location; to get into the feel they even spent their nights at the local museum.

There is only two words in the sign, because there is no such word as "please" in Finnish, expecially not in *this* dialect! I'd say this attitude is what the film is about.
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Spo said:

We have a longer and a shorter version of please. Longer is more like 'be so kind as not to fell the tree', but it is so cumbersome and ceremonial that it easily sounds sarcastic in everyday speech - so we avoid it. :-) The shorter version is used when you hand out something; you just say "Ota!" or "He!" and nothing else. Both translate best to a simple imperative "Take it!"

One reason for this bluntness is that all our word classes have inflexion, which means that a single word can be targeted precisely. Previous imperative "ota" is used when giving something to one person, "ottakaa" when giving to many people and so on. You can also stack inflexions to accommodate, say, conditioning and questioning in one go like "ottaisittekohan?". That is, "would you (many people) maybe please take?". Targeted to one person, that would be "ottaisitkohan?" And so on and on and on.

Difficult? Come on!! :-D
11 years ago
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