# 'rose' in Finno-Ugric (Karelian)



## edwardtheconfessor

Hi. Can anyone help me out here, please?
I need a _Finno-Ugric _(sometimes called 'Karelian') translation of the word 'rose' (noun i.e. the flower).
I have already a Finnish translation as *ruusu*
Would it be the same in Finno-Ugric?
Reason for my interest: it is for a  doctorate thesis I am working on, the opening chapter; it's part of an illustration.
The thesis is not about linguistics or philology, but the illustration compares the word for 'rose' in a number of European
(and some world) languages.  From Portugal to the Ural Mountains and from the Arctic Circle to the Southern Mediterranean, 
I find the same word root (modified only a little).
As the Uni I am submitting to is in Bergen (no, the thesis is not in Norwegian!), it would be helpful I think to also show some
understanding of at least the existence of other Scandinavian peoples and their languages (like Finno-Ugric).
The illustration: from Shakespeare : "That which we call a rose, by any other name ..." etc.

Thanks   - edwardtheconfessor

PS: if it is in Russian characters then a transliteration would be appreciated. Thanks.


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## Määränpää

"Finno-Ugric" is not a language, it's a group of languages just like "Indo-European".


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## Määränpää

According to a Finnish-Karelian online dictionary, rose is _rooza_, _ruuzu_ or _ruužu_ in Karelian.


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## edwardtheconfessor

Määränpää said:


> According to a Finnish-Karelian online dictionary, rose is _rooza_, _ruuzu_ or _ruužu_ in Karelian.



That's very helpful, Maaranpaa (sorry, I don't seem to be able to get Finnish script on my server).  I can therefore suggest in my illustration that each of these three is used, in different 'Karelian' dialects of Finno-Ugric, yes?

Many thanks    - edwardtheconfessor


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## Määränpää

edwardtheconfessor said:


> in different 'Karelian' dialects of Finno-Ugric, yes?



*No!* Would you call the dialects of England "_different 'English' dialects of Indo-European_"?
You need to check what Finno-Ugric means. 

I'm not sure about the relationship between _rooza_ and _ruuzu_. _Ruuzu_ is marked (uud.) which means "modern". But the examples are from different regions, so there could have been a dialectal difference, too.

_Ruužu_ seems to mean a paper rose, so I guess you can forget that one.


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## edwardtheconfessor

Okay. Thanks for the correction. I do know about the (as they used to be called anyway) _'Ural-Altaic' languages_.  I'm not a professional philologist, only a seriously interested amateur.  I had understood this 'Ural-Altaic' linguistic group to be closely equivalent to the _Turanian _group of languages - which also includes, as well as Hungarian, Estonian and Finnish (or Suomi ... is that the same? - I show my ignorance here!) and Sami (or Lapp) ... but also Turkish and the various Turkoman languages of central Europe, as well as Mongolian, Japanese and Korean. Now that's a lot of diverse languages!!

I had thought that the peoples of the Karelian region spoke another language related to Finnish/Suomi .. which I had thought has always been called _'Finno-Ugric'.  _However, I have followed your links. Many thanks for that.  The more I read up on this, the more complex I see it is, and I confess to being a little confused.  If you obtained these word translations from a 'Finnish-Karelian' dictionary, then do I understand that there are, at least, different languages spoken there which are closely related to Finnish? Geographically, of course, they are contiguous, and many ethnologists believe that the ancestors of the Finns, Lapps and Estonians and the peoples of the Karelian side of the peninsula are all related and came originally from farther East, perhaps from a very Westerly branch of the nomadic peoples that once roamed all across the Central Asian steppes.

This is in danger of getting off the thread topic, but I do need to be clear if what I have (which you so kindly looked up for me) are 'Karelian'  language words.  Or is 'Karelian' nothing more than a group of languages closely related to the language of Finland?  If so, should I, for purposes of my illustration, simply call them 'Karelian' variations of, in this case, the same word root? Does that make sense??

Thanks   - edwardtheconfessor


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## altazure

Karelian is a language which is closely related to Finnish. Finno-Ugric is not a single language, but a _genetic_ group of languages which  are all related to each other: Finnish, Karelian, Estonian, Hungarian,  Udmurt, Komi, and many other languages are part of it.

The  Ural-Altaic language group is not a genetic but a _typological_ group, which means that the  languages share similar linguistic features, but it implies no genetic  relation between the languages in the group.


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## Määränpää

edwardtheconfessor said:


> This is in danger of getting off the thread topic, but I do need to be clear if what I have (which you so kindly looked up for me) are 'Karelian'  language words.  Or is 'Karelian' nothing more than a group of languages closely related to the language of Finland?  If so, should I, for purposes of my illustration, simply call them 'Karelian' variations of, in this case, the same word root? Does that make sense??



More from Wikipedia: 





> There is no standard Karelian language so each writer writes in Karelian according to his own dialectal form.





> Karelian language has three main varieties which can be considered as dialects or separate languages


Karelian, like almost every language (Finnish, English, Russian, Arabic...), is a group of dialects.

The languages of minorities don't always have a standardized form, because official documents are never written in these languages. In Russia, official documents about roses are written in Russian, so it doesn't really matter what the 'most correct' word for rose in Karelian is. *The online dictionary I used was based on spoken material collected from different regions.
*
According to the Institute for the Languages of Finland, three different standard Karelian languages are used today. Maybe there are dictionaries for these standard languages somewhere, but not online.


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