A Finnish-American reader writes:
Steve, have you ever investigated the connections between Finnish and Japanese culture? They are legion, and strange: Finns and Japanese are the two ethnic groups with the higest incidences of reversed-hemispheric brain activity, i.e. information from the right eye goes to the right side of the brain instead of the reverse (which is the usual way). There are some strange connections between Finnish and Japanese languages, although they come from quite different families. Doing a quick search for "finns and japanese" or "finnish japanese" yields interesting results, though few scholarly ones.
Also, the first foreign-born member of the Diet of Japan is a Finn, Marutei Tsurunen. And here's a webpage about him, which combines Finglish and Engrish in a very charming way.
You can't see it on a Mercator-projection map, but you can see it on a globe: Eurasia is narrower at high latitudes. From Vladivostok to Finland (or vice-versa) is about the same distance as from Vladivostok to the Caspian Sea. Probably more importantly, there were likely fewer people to have to fight your way past when wandering across the far north than at more habitable latitudes.
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61 comments:
great subject for a blog. I have often thought that there was a lot of Asian in the finns. They look part asian. And there is the fascinating subject of pre-columbian long journeys/migrations. And there are the Ainu, who look part european ad who actually occupied all of japan before the more asian appearing peoples moved in (jomon == ainu).
There are no connections between the Finnish and Japanese languages other than that they happen to look somewhat similar print; other than that it's all in the minds of a few people with pet theories. Besides if you look at Old Japanese (i.e. the way it looked around 500 AD when they were just beginning to learn to write) the resemblance is less.
also note the finnish "saami" people who are blonde and blue eyed, but asian looking: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/2/27/SamiWikibasedCollage.JPG/800px-SamiWikibasedCollage.JPG
Steve, how much was marraige restricted in Japan and Finland?
By that I mean, were all young men in both countries allowed to marry or only those with higher or more secure incomes?
I ask because
In Ireland, many fathers felt that their daughters were better off staying unmarried rather than marrying a man with very low income and very low prospects of ever earning an income. In Ireland, young women that were able to attract a proposal from a wealthy and / or high income man generally were allowed to marry. Young women who were only able to attract the interest of men with very low income were often not allowed to marry. If after a few years no high income men showed up with a proposal, the young woman would sometimes enter a nunnery, but more often she would spend her life in the household of a relative, as a "spinster" or "maiden aunt"
Now I am not Irish and I don't want to be seen as being critical of Ireland or the Irish people. At the time there was poverty and sometimes starvation in Ireland. A father that refused to allow his daughter to marry a poor man may have actually been looking out for the best interests of the daughter, since marrying a poor man many have led to starvation of the daughter or starvation of any children she produced.
Since there are so many students of history on this blog, I would be interested in understanding whether as a general rule, denying young men the ability to marry generally leads to violence, or whether in most cultures the young men just accept it without violence.
My personal hypothesis is that it all goes back to HBD. Some groups are genetically prone to violence and some are not, and access to women is just not going to change that very much.
Let me give an example to which I am familiar. One hundred years ago very large numbers of young Chinese men moved to the American West to take on menial jobs. Generally these young Chinese men had very little access to females, and yet they conducted themselved in a generally non violent manner.
On the other hand, today young African American young men have easy access to females. It has frequently been pointed out that so many young African American men are in prison that the effective sex ratios in many ghettos is three females for every male. Yet easy access to females has not in any way reduced the propensity of these young men to violence.
So I think it is fair to say that access to females doesn't seem to be the silver bullet when it comes to predicting how violent young men will be.
That being said, I would welcome contrary viewpoints. Why have finnish young men traditionally been more violent than Japanese young men?
There is no relation between the Finns and the Japanese. Your argument is very weak.
Dennis, since you have spent some time studying the history of Ireland, may I draw a parallel between the Ireland of two hundred years ago and the Arab world of today?
In Ireland, many fathers felt that their daughters were better off staying unmarried rather than marrying a man with very low income and very low prospects of ever earning an income. In Ireland, young women that were able to attract a proposal from a wealthy and / or high income man generally were allowed to marry. Young women who were only able to attract the interest of men with very low income were often not allowed to marry. If after a few years no high income men showed up with a proposal, the young woman would sometimes enter a nunnery, but more often she would spend her life in the household of a relative, as a "spinster" or "maiden aunt"
Now I am not Irish and I don't want to be seen as being critical of Ireland or the Irish people. At the time there was poverty and sometimes starvation in Ireland. A father that refused to allow his daughter to marry a poor man may have actually been looking out for the best interests of the daughter, since marrying a poor man many have led to starvation of the daughter or starvation of any children she produced.
Since there are so many students of history on this blog, I would be interested in understanding whether as a general rule, denying young men the ability to marry generally leads to violence, or whether in most cultures the young men just accept it without violence.
My personal hypothesis is that it all goes back to HBD. Some groups are genetically prone to violence and some are not, and access to women is just not going to change that very much.
Let me give an example to which I am familiar. One hundred years ago very large numbers of young Chinese men moved to the American West to take on menial jobs. Generally these young Chinese men had very little access to females, and yet they conducted themselved in a generally non violent manner.
On the other hand, today young African American young men have easy access to females. It has frequently been pointed out that so many young African American men are in prison that the effective sex ratios in many ghettos is three females for every male. Yet easy access to females has not in any way reduced the propensity of these young men to violence.
So I think it is fair to say that access to females doesn't seem to be the silver bullet when it comes to predicting how violent young men will be.
That being said, I would welcome contrary viewpoints.
Interesting. Presumably, as genetic research continues, we'll get some hard data on hunches like this.
On a broader level, why did Northeast Asians and Northern Europeans turn out looking so different from one another? You would have thought that since they both evolved in cold, hostile environments they would have adapted similar traits, but obviously that is not true (even the genetic mechanism for lighter skin is completely different in the two).
Maybe the Northeast Asians faced an entirely different set of micro-circumstances that led to their appearance. But here's an explanation that I like best and I don't see talked about very often - a fairly large amout of racial variation may have developed while our ancestors were still in Africa. Throughout the last 100000 years several different waves of humans have "pulsed" out of Africa. In particular, some may have come across at the Sinai peninsula, and some may have crossed at the Horn of Africa. I think that Caucasians and Mongoloids might be descended from two separate such waves.
One of the pastimes of speakers of a small language group is linguistics. For Estonians (very strongly related to Finnish) , the question always is: what is the origin of the Finno-Ugric language group. It is not Indo-European - that much is known for sure. beyond that it gets murky and there are some strange theories. One is that languages like Estonian and Finnish are related to Japanese. This is not quite as outlandish as it first seems.
One of the pastimes of speakers of a small language group is linguistics. For Estonians (very strongly related to Finnish), the question always is: what is the origin of the Finno-Ugric language group. It is not Indo-European - that much is known for sure. Beyond that it gets murky and there are some strange theories. One is that languages like Estonian and Finnish are related to Japanese. This is not quite as outlandish as it first seems. Various northern Siberian languages in the far east, such as Samoyed, are demonstrably Finno-Ugric. And at a distance, Japanese has a remarkably similar sound to Estonian.
The not-generally-accepted Altaic hypothesis says Finnish and Japanese are distantly related, along with Tukish, Mongolian, Korean and many others. Make of it what you will.
The Finns and the Japanese also have some of the highest suicide rates in the world (14th and 4th respectively, according to Wikipedia). Most of the other top 15 countries neighbor Finland and Japan.
Per capita consumption of fish is high in Finland but it isn't up to Japanese levels (Norway and Iceland are more in line with Japan). For me, it's all about the fish. Then again there is that sauna thing; but otherwise they are dead ringers for each other.
if you think they are really kin just look at the DNA, not at the incidence of weird mutations.
I was just reading Razib Khan's similar thoughts about potential contacts between Sakha (Yakuts) and Eskimos. Long distance travel up North is a lot easier sometimes.
But are Finns notorious perverts across the board? That's one of the first things that comes to mind about Japanese culture.
Any visitor to Finnish cities will know that Japanese fashion and culture is popular among Finns
Speaking as their next-door neighbor, Finns are indeed fascinating people. If you look at Murray's book Human Accomplishment, the highest-achieving Nordic countries in the arts and sciences are Denmark and Sweden, with Norway as number three a few steps behind and Finland quite clearly as number four. Finland is a cold country and has therefore experienced selection pressures for high IQ, but I don't think they have higher IQ than their Scandinavian neighbors. They outperform Norway now mainly because of their education system.
Since I'm already here I'd like to recommend the book The Perils of Diversity: Immigration and Human Nature by Professor Byron M. Roth to those who read this blog on a regular basis.
Norman Davies' Europe makes a lot of the Finns being essentially an Asiatic people.
There are more broad cultural similarities between settled people from Scandinavia and North Asia: Similar temperaments(introverted), similar social systems(emphasizing altruism and conformity) and similar aesthetic preferences(simplicity).
It probably has to do with selection pressures for practicing agriculture in Northern latitudes.
"Also, the rural folk of Finland looked a lot like Amerindians in 1900."
B-Lode, those are Lapps, not Finns. Lapps ARE native to northern Finno-Scandia, but they were always nomads, not farmers, and they're clearly genetically distinct from everybody else in Europe, including from Finns. Saami are Lapps, but Suomi are Finns.
Interesting comment thread -I know many people, some of them fairly intelligent, who think that Nokia is a Japanese company. In its own way Nokia does sound kind of Japanese
I've seen DNA studies that indicate Finns have more Asian markers than other European populations, the eastern part of the country more than the west. I interviewed a group of Sami activists from Finland at a Scandinavian American festival a few months ago and they noted the striking similarities between their culture and some of the Indian tribes on the Northern Plains. They were doing a joint presentation with one of the local tribes. Professors at the state university have noted those similarities since the 1960s and have studied them in Finland. There's a shared inheritance from the circumpolar northern peoples around the Arctic Circle, Central Asians, going back a few thousand years.
The Finns and the Swedes have some Sami inheritance, which accounts for any Asian connection and also for the Eurasian looks that some Russians also have.
There was enough discrimination against them on the basis of the supposed Mongolian connection that I think they now emphasize that they have more in common with other western European populations. I think the Asian connection is neat myself and I'd be proud if it turned out that my quarter Finnish ancestry included some Sami.
And there are the Ainu, who look part european ad who actually occupied all of japan before the more asian appearing peoples moved in (jomon == ainu).
There are pictures of the Ainu on the internet wherein they look like dead-ringers for a skinny [& aging] Sean Connery [if only he had the white beard].
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I was just reading Razib Khan's similar thoughts about potential contacts between Sakha (Yakuts) and Eskimos. Long distance travel up North is a lot easier sometimes.
Compare:
Orkney Islanders have Siberian relatives
23 May 2008
telegraph.co.uk
Orkney Islanders are more closely related to people in Siberia and in Pakistan than those in Africa and the near East, according to a novel method to chart human migrations.
The surprising findings come from a new way to infer ancient human movements from the variation of DNA in people today, conducted by a team from the University of Oxford and University College Cork, which has pioneered a technique that analyses the entire human genetic makeup, or genome...
But the subsequent movements around the world, via the near east, central Asia and then Europe, turned up some surprises including a strong similarity between the Sindih, a people who once lived in Pakistan, and Orkney Islanders, or Orcadians.
In turn, the Orcadians are closely related to the people who first colonised Siberia.
"Reindeer herders (a people called the Yakut) are indeed unexpectedly related to British, because one of their strongest signals of ancestry is from Orcadians, the only British population in the sample" says Dr Daniel Falush of University College Cork, a co-author on the paper in the journal PLoS Genetics...
For those of you who don't know, the Orkneys are way up here.
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Yeah, lots of Finns have the epicantic fold on the eyes that is typical of Ural-Altaic and Turanid races of Siberia and northern Mongolia. Finnish also has an inflexion that is unlike Indo-European languages because it is not one. Finns also strike me as markedly different in morphologically and phenotypically from, say, Norwegians. Finns also excel in spatial organization skill to a degree that is higher than Europeans and more akin to Northern Asians.
"There is no relation between the Finns and the Japanese. Your argument is very weak."
Hai!
I find it interesting that nobody has brought up the Inuit languages. Especially Greenlandic; that looks far more Finnish than Japanese does, IMHO. However, despite the similarities on the surface, they seem to have no cognates whatsoever except on a random level, and so do not seem related.
Yeah, lots of Finns have the epicantic fold on the eyes that is typical of Ural-Altaic and Turanid races of Siberia and northern Mongolia. Finnish also has an inflexion that is unlike Indo-European languages because it is not one. Finns also strike me as markedly different in morphologically and phenotypically from, say, Norwegians. Finns also excel in spatial organization skill to a degree that is higher than Europeans and more akin to Northern Asians.
I think "inflexion" is a bad word to use here. Despite the fact that the Finnish words for numbers are not Indo-European, which definitely marks the language as non-IE, Finnish verb conjugations actually DO look strongly Indo-European:
minä puhun
sinä puhut
hän puhuu
me puhumme
te puhutte
he puhuvat
This guy has an affinity for Japanese electronics. Is that an indicator?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-z4iw8Ppo1o
The idea that Finnish and Japanese are related isn't as weird as it might appear on the surface but I don't know of any serious linguists who accept it.
Finnish is definitely Finno-Ugric, Finno-Ugric used to be part of a larger proposed language family Ural-Altaic. But no linguist (that I know of) accepts Ural-Altaic as a viable language family anymore.
Japanese is either
a) an isolate
b) in a small language family with Korean
b) very, very distantly related to Altaic (which includes Turkish and Mongolian).
The problem is that Altaic hasn't been looking too healthy lately and many linguists no longer accept it as a valid grouping.
Most of the similarities are typological and finding cognates (words in different languages that trace their origin to a common acestor word like night, Nacht, noche and noc and others in Indo-European) is hard to impossible and many of the supposed cognates end up looking like chance correspondences* or loans from something else).
*words which are known to be not related but which seem similar in form and meaning like English 'so' and Japanese 'sou'.
Steve's correspondent wrote that "Finns and Japanese are the two ethnic groups with the higest incidences of reversed-hemispheric brain activity".
I've heard that Basques also manifest this feature.
In the past the most learned, or opinionated, of Western linguists praised French as unparalleled in its melody and regularity of sound and syntax; but listening to this hymn from the Finnish Orthodox Church demonstrates that Finnish is a language with inexpressible beauty in its softness and delicacy.
Japanese isn't a harsh language, as Arabic or Turkish are in that they grate the ears when spoken, but I disbelieve that it reaches that pitch of smooth purity our senses met in Finnish speech.
The Finns and the Swedes have some Sami inheritance, which accounts for any Asian connection and also for the Eurasian looks that some Russians also have.
Is there no Asian inheritance in Russia from the Mongol's and Golden Hoard's nearly 300yr rule?
There is no such thing as a Uralic-Altaic language group. This crackpot theory is totally idiotic, outdated and disproven.
The Samis constitute circa 0.1 % of the population of Finland.
Wikipedia:
According to the Finnish Population Registry Center and the Finnish Sami parliament, the Sami population living in Finland was 7,371 in 2003.[80] As of 31 December 2006, only 1776 of them had registered to speak one of the Sami languages as the mother tongue.[81]
The former number would be 0.14 % of the population, the latter circa 0.03 %.
It is utterly ridiculous to use the Samis as an argument when talking about the Finns. These are two entirely different ethnicities. The Samis are descendants of the ice age population of the Iberian refugium. They are genetically very different from the Finns and are not relevant to the discussion.
You should read something about the subject before making a lot of wild guesses based on total ignorance.
Yet despite the centuries long contact with Mongols and other Asians, there are more "absolute" blonds in Russia than anywhere else in the world, including Scandinavia and the Balkans.
I thought it was already well established that Russians also have some Asian ancestry. There's certainly been a strong central Asian presence historically and intermarriage, etc.
Even looking at blood type distribution, blood type B is far more common among Asians than it is in northern and western Europe. It's about twice as common in Finland (17 percent) and Estonia (23 percent) and Russia (23 percent) as it is in the UK (10 percent). Blood type B distribution is 30 percent in India and 27 percent in Hong Kong, by comparison. I'd assume that the origin point is the population that still has the greatest number of people with the characteristic.
Most European populations were mixed, whether it was hundreds or thousands of years back. What I find interesting is how similar some of traditional costumes look in some Asian tribes compared with the costumes I've seen in tribal ceremonies in North America, even though any connection had to have been thousands of years ago. The colors are almost exactly alike, the use of the drum in certain ceremonies is similar, etc. It seems that culture hangs on even over that long a period of separation.
Except for a portage in Chita, I identified an ice highway from Finland to northern Japan. That's one reason I visited Irkutsk in Dec. 1998 but, alas, I was unable to get to the portage during my stay, although a professor with whom I visited in Akademgorodok said archaeologists were interested in that region for other reasons.
> the first foreign-born member of the Diet
> of Japan is a Finn, Marutei Tsurunen ...
...is an ecologista extraordinaire moonbat, fww:
"To save the earth we need to revolutionize our civilization" (homepage)
The Japanese might be better off without him.
OT. Headache.
http://www.npr.org/2010/12/11/131988659/Left-Leaning-Nutcracker-Suite-Sets-A-Sour-Scene
I read the comments on this thread and wonder how this entire issue might even be discussed these days without first mentioning what is known based on genetic comparisons between the Finns and the Japanese.
I had been under the impression that such studies had concluded that there was little or no such relation, and that the Japanese were in fact very similar only to other East Asian groups. I might be wrong about this, because my memory can't really be relied on here.
But why propose theories that don't account for what is already established genetically?
Well, aside from these trivial points about brain hemispheres and such, the most important similarity between Finns and Japs is that they both remain stridently nationalistic and anti-immigration in this age of the multicult and open borders degradation. God bless em.
an ice highway from Finland to northern Japan
My guess would be that something similar allowed the Orkney Islanders' ancestors to make it to greater "Kamchatka".
Either that, or else the world was [relatively recently] much hotter, and they were able to "sail" [or paddle] across the North Pole.
Except for a portage in Chita, I identified an ice highway from Finland to northern Japan.
What do you mean by "ice highway"?
Peter Frost argues that East Asians have their origins in North Asia and came from early Europeans as their "offspring":
http://evoandproud.blogspot.com/2010/10/did-human-evolution-accelerate.html
"East Asians, like the Inuit and Amerindians, have their origins in North Asia, as seen by their ‘Arctic’ physiognomy. These early North Asians in turn came from early Europeans, specifically the reindeer-hunting nomads who spread eastward through the steppe-tundra belt of northern Eurasia. In other words, Europeans and East Asians are not siblings who parted company in the Middle East some 45,000 years ago. The latter are instead ‘offspring’ of the former, the two groups having become reproductively isolated from each other at the height of the last ice age, c. 20,000 BP."
I don't know if these early Europeans are related to modern day Europeans. I believe modern day Europeans come from Indo-Europeans who originate from a more southern location.
Perhaps these reindeer-hunting, nomadic early Europeans that the North Asians split from were more like a Saami type group or a proto-Saami type group.
A few weeks back, there was a very peculiar segment on NBC News regarding the schools in Finland.
The story was in response to the recent data suggesting that Finnish schools were tops worldwide in educating their students in the basics.
A little into the segment, I saw a number of faces of African heritage, some of them featured quite prominently. I thought that quite odd, because I just didn't think of Finland as including any significant number of African heritage.
So I looked up the demographics of Finland. While there was no separate breakdown of African heritage, the highest numbers of people from African countries would suggest that roughly 1 in 1,000 might be African.
So how do you get from a representation so very low to being able to find 3 or 4 in a segment like this? I think that likely requires a great amount of concerted effort.
What struck me most about this obvious, going WAY out one's way level of effort, is that I couldn't see just exactly what the clearly distorting impact was supposed to be. That those of African heritage manage to do very well when they are in fine schools like those of Finland? That the excellence of Finnish schools has nothing to do with racial or ethnic composition? Or was it just the rigid demand that every story about matters like that must include an obeisance to diversity, however contrived?
The distortion of the underlying facts was so grotesque in this case, and so plainly deliberate, that it must have been perceived that some quite important need was at stake.
There is no such thing as a Uralic-Altaic language group. This crackpot theory is totally idiotic, outdated and disproven.
It is utterly ridiculous to use the Samis as an argument when talking about the Finns. These are two entirely different ethnicities.
But Americans, whose language you are arguing in, commonly use the names of ethnic groups/nationalities to refer to nationalities. And as you've shown, Thousands of Sami have Finnish citizenship. Scream all you want, kick them out if you want, what the hell do I care
The Samis are descendants of the ice age population of the Iberian refugium. They are genetically very different from the Finns and are not relevant to the discussion.
Right, right, because no one ever ever EVER refers to Native Americans as "Americans". Thanks. How dare we have a conversation IN ENGLISH USING THE RULES OF ENGLISH.
You should read something about the subject before making a lot of wild guesses based on total ignorance.
But, as you showed with your first comment, "something" will emphatically not be enough. It has to be something ultra-touchy, probably extreme leftist Finns don't consider "idiotic, outdated, and disproven".
Is this how you talk to everyone who takes an interest in your country?
You can't see it on a Mercator-projection map, but you can see it on a globe: Eurasia is narrower at high latitudes. From Vladivostok to Finland (or vice-versa) is about the same distance as from Vladivostok to the Caspian Sea. Probably more importantly, there were likely fewer people to have to fight your way past when wandering across the far north than at more habitable latitudes.
An example of this concerns the word caïque, a kind of boat, which came into English from Turkish via French. Eventually English explorers encountered a similar word among the Inuit: kayak. The two words had migrated east and west from a common origin in Siberia or Central Asia.
Cennbeorc
Peter Frost argues that East Asians have their origins in North Asia and came from early Europeans as their "offspring":
-----------------------------
This is true but remember than modern East Asians are descended from North Eurasian people overlayed on the indigenous populations, who were more related to SE Asians. Europeans are descended from a substrate of North Eurasians overlayed with Near Easterners(who the North Eurasians themselves split off from several thousands of years earlier). Modern races may be hybrids of various archaic races which may no longer exist in their pure form.
Anonymous who brings up Ireland does not seem to realize that the late marriage age and "spinsters" are a fairly recent development there, one caused by the Famine of 1845. Before the Famine the marriage age was abnormally low by Western European standards, which led to the land shortage, which led to the Famine disaster. Many other European countries had loss of crops and some famine too at the time, but it is the overpopulated Ireland that suffered from this most catastrophically.
Personal anecdote of mild interest: my cousin and I share my paternal grandfather, who was a first-generation Finnish-American and pretty much the archetype of the species (highly intelligent, introverted, didn't suffer fools). Said cousin, who resembles our grandfather physically and in personality, has lived and worked in Japan for the past several years and seems to be very much at home in the Japanese culture.
I guess this would be an appropriate time to mention a joke a Finnish manager at a Finnish company told me.
How do you tell whether a Finn is outgoing?
When he talks to you, he looks at YOUR shoes.
This is true but remember than modern East Asians are descended from North Eurasian people overlayed on the indigenous populations, who were more related to SE Asians. Europeans are descended from a substrate of North Eurasians overlayed with Near Easterners(who the North Eurasians themselves split off from several thousands of years earlier). Modern races may be hybrids of various archaic races which may no longer exist in their pure form.
Why didn't you read the rest of my comment before commenting?
This is what I already said:
"I don't know if these early Europeans are related to modern day Europeans. I believe modern day Europeans come from Indo-Europeans who originate from a more southern location.
Perhaps these reindeer-hunting, nomadic early Europeans that the North Asians split from were more like a Saami type group or a proto-Saami type group."
One word for a drunk in finnish is the rather long "juopporatti" which
strangely enough means exactly the same thing in japanese.
Finland`s scores in Pisa are already on the downhill at least in reading so the immigration is probably already showing. The immigration has been mainly a very recent phenomenon in here. Our immigrations law are not IMO not hard at all.
Finland has unusual amount of rural population, which is/was a political choice, I don`t exactly know why, maybe because our "soft type dictator" Kekkonen wanted so or something.
But in cities there are immigrants. In the place near the arctic circle I see black and arabs every day, sometimes even women with full burkhas, on my way if I take a bus and go downtown.
"There are more broad cultural similarities between settled people from Scandinavia and North Asia: Similar temperaments(introverted), similar social systems(emphasizing altruism and conformity) and similar aesthetic preferences(simplicity)."
I can see your point, and the introversion part is certainly true. However, I'm not so sure about the conformity part... I suppose the Nordic countries are more conformistic than, say, the UK, but are they really more conformistic than Arab or African countries? Sure, the Scandinavian nations and Finland all have a large state, that the population generally trusts, but there really is not the sort of cultural conformity you see in many other countries.
Of course, this could be a question of how modernized a society is.
Also: the Nordic countries are very focused on equality, for good and ill (this is one of the reasons for the strong & big state). East Asia? Not really.
"Yet despite the centuries long contact with Mongols and other Asians, there are more "absolute" blonds in Russia than anywhere else in the world, including Scandinavia and the Balkans."
Got a source for that? Russia got a lot of ethnic minorities and pretty much every famous Russian I can think of is brown or black haired. I live in Sweden and pure blonds are a minority here, too - most people got light brown or ash blonde hair - but percentage-wise it just got to be more here, and in Norway, than there are in Russia.
The Balkans aren't famous for having lots of blondes.
M.A. said...
One word for a drunk in finnish is the rather long "juopporatti" which
strangely enough means exactly the same thing in japanese.
12/14/2010
Not true at all.
The word juopporatti is very rarely used in Finnish. The normal word for drunkard is simply juoppo, derived from the verb juoda, to drink. The word ratti (in this context) is an obsolete word that means funnel. Thus a juopporatti is a drunkard who pours lots of alcohol down his throat as if through a funnel. (In modern Finnish, the word ratti means the steering wheel of a car, but that has obviously nothing to with this.)
The Japanese word you are referring to is yopparachatta which is obviously not the same word as juopporatti.
Try to think of some more defendable bullshit next time.
In the place near the arctic circle I see black and arabs every day, sometimes even women with full burkhas, on my way if I take a bus and go downtown.
Ruh-roh.
Do y'all have a Second Amendment over there?
Regarding blonde/light hair... here's a map easily found on the net that I do not know the source of: http://forums.skadi.net/photoplog/images/25637/1_blond_hair_map1.jpg
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