Family Tree (Titus/Dingus)

[Jussi Mantere]

On Tue, 20 Aug 2002, [iso-8859-1] Sigvald Grøsfjeld jr. wrote:

> But at that point you Swedes really make it confusing,
> by using "Farbror Joakim" and "Farbror Kalle" instead
> of "Onkel" as in Norwegian and Danish. In the
> Scandinavian languages "Farbror" normally means a

Well, exactly the same applies in Finnish, where "setä" means the brother
of the father, while "eno" is the correct word for the brother of the
mother. So, both $crooge and Donald should be "Roope-eno" and "Aku-eno"
instead of "-setä".

However, the translation mistake is quite understandable in both
languages. At least in Finnish, when HDL first appeared in the Taliaferro
strips, I'm quite sure that the translator had no idea of any family trees
or family histories, so he/she just translated "uncle" the way it sounded
better. Same applies to $crooge, I s'pose. And after calling them "setä"
for years or even decades, there'd be little point in changing the word.

(after all, I suspect that the false translation has lead to a point where
some Finnish children call all their uncles "setä" and don't even know the
word "eno", at least that applied to me when I was about 10 years old :)

-- 
. jussi mantere
. http://www.iki.fi/obs/
. mister, i ain't no boy, no i'm a man
.. and i believe in the promised land