December 2, 2008

Dear Research Institute for the Languages of Finland (RILF),

Three months after I was born, my mother could no longer hide me from the Pharaoh, and so she took for me an ark of bulrushes, and daubed it with slime and with pitch, and put me therein, and she laid it in the flags by the brink of the Nile. I ended up in New Jersey, where I was adopted by a selectively Amish couple (electricity is OK on weekends and special occasions). I scoured the earth trying to locate my biological mother, but to no avail. Then, one day, I was moving the ark of bulrushes to a storage closet (to make room for a Russian doll collection), and what do you know: my real mother must have dropped her passport, driver’s license, social security card, a photo of herself with the inscription “Kevin’s biological mother,” and her Costco card right there in the ark when she pushed me off into the Nile. I gathered these items and brought them to a detective who, for only $400, determined her address. I bought a ticket for Finland and hopped on the blimp.

There she was: the brown tresses, the deep black eyes, and the red polka dot dress. “Who the hell are you?” she screamed when I jumped onto her shoulders for a piggyback ride. Then I went to look for my mother. It was not easy: there were over 12 houses on her street between 140 and 178. Any one of them could be 152. I thought I had found my parents, but then I realized there were numbers on the houses, so I put down my slice of pie and said goodbye to the strangers. My mother’s house was chartreuse with vermillion shutters, a cerulean door, rufous windows, hyacinthine railing, and a chimney that was not quite Oxford blue. I wasn’t sure of Finnish greetings, so I bowed, shook her hand, hugged her, and slapped her gently. She began speaking some dialect of IKEA that I couldn’t understand, and like that flash of light you see when you turn on the switch and the bulb burns out and you don’t have any replacements, I realized that not everyone speaks English. So I did the only logical thing: I told her I was her son through interpretive dance.

I stayed for a while but communication was ineffective; she had only a B.A. in interpretive dance. I returned to New Jersey and am currently learning Finnish so I can finally tell her about this pretty funny joke I heard one time. At first, I was daunted by the language’s numerous case endings, but with a few beers and some hallucinogens I was able to latch on. What I don’t get, though, is why you’ve left so many English prepositions in the dust. Take, for example, some case endings in your language:

I get how this works. But I’m having trouble expressing simple sentences in Finnish that have no case endings as defined by your grammar. I propose, therefore, the following addenda to your case system, which may help to make the language more efficient, and help me to talk to my mother:

I’ve been studying Finnish for six years now, but I still can’t tell my mother that one joke about the boy who is standing across from a house, and seriously contemplating going inside, but then he’s spied by the inhabitants and he runs away like a little girl, screaming, “taloooooooooo!” I crack up every time I hear that one.

Thank you for your time, RILF. I will be back in Finland before you can say, “talolskalaloonastanta.” Please let me know about those new case endings.

Sincerely,

Kevin Dickinson

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