Re: Etymology of Fennoman

I think many Lithuanian kids would imagine that 'narkomanas' is
borrowed from English narco- plus man.

Of course, as per below, it is not. Yhere are other -manas words in
Lithuanian, such as 'grafomanas'
(petty scrtibbler with delusions of being a great writer) and
'lenkomanas' (one of the silly bugger Lithuanian noblemen of the 18th
and 19th centuries who thought all things Polish were cool and wanted
to turn themselves into pseudo-Poles. The Polish-speaking population
is 99% descended from them - which is why it is no tragedy when they
give up this nonsense and revert to their Lithuanian roots, as the
young are doing in droves.

On Jul 25, 9:13 am, Eugene Holman <hol...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
In article <1185366014.400133.88...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,

martin <marti...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

<deletions>



I would consider it a typo, since they are using it as an attribute:

"Early Fennomen activities..."

not as a plural noun.

Interesting. There seems to be a lot of typos out there, A google web
search on "fennomans" returns 1860 hits, "Fennomen" returns 3360 hits.
However a google book search returns 35 hits for "fennomen" and 64
hits for "fennomans", so there certainly some confusion out there.

If you do a Google search for texts containing the words "Fennomen" you
find 3360 hits; the corresponding figure for "Fennomans" is 1,850. If,
however you do one for texts containing "Fennomen" and "nationalist" you
get only 22 hits. A search for "Fennomans" and "nationalist" gives 627
hits.

A minority of writers expounding on Finnish history are, incorrectly I
would claim, pluralizing Fennoman as Fennomen, mistakingly believing
that it is a compound word based on -man, like Dutchman, rather than a
word based on the Swedish version of a Greek word that shows up in
English as mania when referring to the abstract noun, and as maniac when
referring to a person characterized by the concept, e.g. megalomania,
megalomaniac. If the word had been coined in English directly from
Classical Greek elements rather than entered English circuitously from
Greek through Swedish, we would have Fennomania and Fennomaniac. While
there is nothing wrong with Fennomania, I think that Fennomaniac might
create a deceptive impression.

A closer look at the Fennomen shows that the overwhelming majority of
uses have nothing to do with the Fennoman movement of the 19th century,
but are trade names, evidently attention-grabbing variants of the word
fenomen 'phenomenon' used in many European languages.

Regards,
Eugene Holman


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