The Finns always say that Finnish is a difficult language to learn.

Many foreigners take them at their word and don't bother.

(These days you can just about get away with English in fact, although I wouldn't want to.)

But then some berk comes along and says that Finnish isn't difficult to learn at all. This time (a couple of weeks ago) it was an English professor.

He's mad of course.

It may not be difficult to get used to the 14 (or is it 17?) cases; it may not be difficult to get used to having no "the"s and "a"s and having prepositions stuck on the end of words or even having words at the beginning of a sentence actually belong to words halfway through the sentence because their endings are the same.

It certainly isn't difficult to get used to stressing the first syllable all the time; rolling your "r"s as if you were in the north of Scotland or even to pronounce two "n"s (and every other letter you can think of) differently from a single "n" - although that last one is something that I've spent 17 years trying and failing to get right.

So I suppose from the mad professor point-of-view Finnish is an incredibly easy language.

But wait until you start trying to understand what people are saying and you realize that not only do you not understand the entire sentence, you don't even understand the subject of the conversation.

Because one thing with Finnish that *is* certainly difficult is the fact that you can't guess the meaning of words based on knowledge of Germanic; Latin-based; or Slavic languages. In fact you can guess the meanings of hardly any Finnish words - you just simply have to know them.

Of course from a mad professor linguistic point-of-view that's irrelevant. But try holding conversations and you soon find that instead of the "know 50%, guess the rest" that was the situation when I started learning Swedish, you have a "know 90%, haven't a clue" situation when it comes to Finnish.

-----------------------

Ah, but it's easy for Hungarians, I hear you cry.

Well yes the grammar is very similar so from a mad professor point-of-view they are incredibly similar and a snap to learn one if you speak the other. But that's as far as it goes. Hungarian words are not only with a (truly) handful of exceptions completely different from Finnish ones, they are also different from Germanic; Latin-based and Slavic languages too. So in Hungarian too you spend all your time trying to add to your vocabulary so at least you know what people are talking about.

Thus, just as with Finnish, not having the time to get that so-called simple grammar right ...

------------------------

In fact the only other nation that seems to find it remarkably easy to learn Finnish are the Estonians (I had in fact to be told that the new office cleaners are Estonian because I couldn't notice any difference).

It doesn't work in reverse though. Finns can't speak Estonian for toffee. To my mind it's the same as the Dutch and Germans. Similar languages but one is easier to pronounce than the other (plus one is a smaller country than the other).

I suspect that many people thought when I wrote a while back that summer was over here that I was having hallucinations.

But on Saturday morning (16th September) I had to play golf at 9 o'clock in an end-of-season competition and when I walked to the car the (Finnish) neighbour just driving in to the car park remarked on how cold it was.

The car showed 3 degrees but that was in the car port and as soon as I left that it showed 2 degrees. But having headed westwards for several kms, it moved to zero and stayed there for most of the rest of the journey.

Golf was then played in several layers of clothes (as thick jackets etc. were still at home - oops) which was fine until the sun started heating things up a bit and I was probably over-dressed for the last couple of hours.

But, fun ? No, it wasn't much.

We had the Asem conference here and anarchists had called for a riot.

So the police called in reinforcements and cordoned them off and managed to contain things with comparatively little violence and certainly much less damage to property than would have been caused if they had been allowed to get going before being policed.

Certainly much less damage and complaints about police brutallity than in other cities that have recently housed similar events (including Gothenburg, Sweden). In fact all people seem to have complained about is that they ("onlookers") hadn't been allowed to leave the area for a few hours (easily explained by "we could only allow a few people out at a time because otherwise the anarchists would have simply grouped somewhere else outside the cordon").

Despite this total success in containing a potentially dangerous situation with little violence the press are seemingly enjoying finding any stick they can to bash the police with. One such is that a lawyer had sent a large number of copies of a fax offering his services to named prisoners (40+ or so faxes) and these hadn't been delivered to the prisoners who therefore hadn't been able to ask for his services. (Police comment: we had better things to do that act as fax delivers")

Sometimes the police can't win. If they hadn't contained this in the way they did, there would have still been complaints of police brutality yet at the same time the press would have had a field day writing about all the destruction caused by the anarchists and "where were the police?".

As the police pointed out officially organised demonstrations (a number in the twenties of demos were held) were allowed to procede along agreed routes, yet none of the anarchists would agree to talk to the police before their "demo" about their route and march aims. It's hard to say why then they should be aggrieved about not being allowed to march (and destroy).

The Finnish Stock Exchange is very much dominated by Nokia. The effect on the (Hex) index is rather large whenever Nokia shares move up or down.

But this piece isn't about that. It's in fact about why I was interested in that LogicaCMG bid for WM-data.

Mainly it was because of the effect it was (and is) seeming to have on my shares in Tietoenator which is the largest Nordic IT services company (Number 1 in both Finland [ex Tieto; ex Tietotehdas] and Number 1 (?) in Sweden [ex Enator]) but also because I, a few years ago, had some shares in Novo Group and I sold them after a bid from SysOpen but *before* a much better bid from WM-data, so I was wondering whether history was going to repeat itself (except that I don't have any WM-data shares) and a counter bid for WM-data was going to come in at a price higher than the 27.75 SEK (ca 3 Euros) that LogicaCMG were paying. [A counter bid at 30 SEK or more makes the accepted offer no longer accepted and the two main shareholders can back out].

What happened with Tietoenator was to my mind odd.

First on news of the LogicaCMG bid for WM-data, the price of Tietoenator shot down, because the market saw this as increased competition.

It's hard to spot the logic in this as LogicaCMG has virtually no business overlaps with WM-data (60 people in a Stockholm office) and so for quite a while there would in fact be LESS competition while people here got used to new reporting channels; new tools etc. etc. All the mess in fact that goes with any takeover or merger. I.e. in my opinion Tietoenator have a major opportunity to increase their own market share in their two key markets while one of their main rivals in those markets is forced to re-evaluate itself.

After however the price had - as above - shot down, and then seem to stabilize at a new low plateau, it suddenly shot up again (to roughly the level it was before the drop - and it's kept on creeping up from that level since) because - the papers wrote - of "sentiment" that  Tietoenator might also be a takeover target from an international giant.

Again missing my point above that in fact a rise in share price could be justified by a (year's?) window of opportunity while "WM-data - a LogicaCMG company" is sorting itself out.

Do I think that there is any justification in thinking there might be a bid for Tietoenator ?

Well I hope not. The share price is at the moment at around 23 Euros and the natural price for the company to my mind is around 30+. So even a 20% increase on today's price made as part of a bid for the company (making 27.60 Euros) would for me be a disappointment.

Anyway I like the fact that there is at least one major Finnish (Tietoenator's MD is Finnish and the company head office is in Finland) IT services company left.

This is in a way an explanation of why I wrote the previous item about LogicaCMG's managers not getting WM-data and especially not getting WM-data Finland.

It all started with a question from an analyst in the web conference after the "agreed offer" had been announced. He asked about the name that would be used by the WM-data companies once they were part of LogicaCMG.

The answer from the chairman of LogicaCMG was that at first the name would be "WM-data - A LogicaCMG company" but that within the first year that name would change "except in Sweden where the company has an established name" and he then went on to specify all the other countries in turn starting with Finland and say that they would all change their name to only "LogicaCMG" within that first year.

This struck me immediately as a major mistake as WM-data is well-established in the Finnish market and has positive name recognition helped by the publicist efforts of the Finnish managing director who has throughout the years kept popping up in the local press (and who a couple of weeks ago was the subject of a four page article in the Finnish equivalent of (a more up-market so closer to the german Der Spiegel) Time).

Recently I was at a Microsoft event so I asked a couple of people there (one from Microsoft and the other from a foreign-owned competitor to WM-data here) what they thought the reputation of WM-data in Finland was. (To get a truthful result all I said was I don't think the reputation is all that bad.) Both said very clearly that WM-data has a good name in the Finnish market.

I followed this up later that day with asking a friend who actively uses the web for information whether  she thought WM-data had a positive clang to it in the Finnish market and she immediately pointed out a couple of Internet services that were very useful to her that had been provided by WM-data.

So there you have it. WM-data has - at least in my straw poll - a positive name in the Finnish market and yet LogicaCMG are planning to abandon the name and in effect start afresh with "LogicaCMG". Surely they've heard of brands being worth serious money ?

As an aside the guy from the foreign-owned competitor said that only now after more than four years of serious investment in the Finnish market is his company getting any name recognition.

That statement (and general principles about the value of brands) ought to make somebody in LogicaCMG headquarters in England think a bit before they make rash decisions to abandon a known brand - with a positive image - in favour of a totally unknown brand - with no image at all.

In fact the statement in the press conference made me sure that they had only been talking to Swedes before making the offer to buy what they thought was a "Swedish" company. Which leads me back to that other piece ...

We're getting nearer to the time when the LogicaCMG bid for WM-data (mentioned earlier) goes through and still there has been no counter-bid.

So it's perhaps time to think about what LogicaCMG think they are buying.

My guess is that they think they are buying a Swedish company with branches abroad in the same way that when they bought a French company last year, they also bought its subsidiaries. If so they need a few lessons in Swedish companies.

Here's one.

I very much suspect that LogicaCMG runs it's present subsidiaries (all countries except Britain; the Netherlands and France) from head office. There's no doubt a country manager in each country but in effect most decisions are made at head office and orders issued to the local subsidiaries. That's how things worked when I worked for ICL in its heyday.

Not so in the case of Swedish companies.

I worked for SKF once and that multinational always "advised" its subsidiaries (including the larger ones such as Germany; France; UK and Italy) that they should do (or not do) certain things. Only the UK realised that this advice was in fact intended to be an order, the others just treated it as advice - the Germans no doubt took it literally whereas the French and Italians knew the intent but pretended they didn't. So we once had the "advice" that no subsidiaries should make long-term contracts with computer consultancies; followed rapidly by the French subsidiary's binding 2 year contract with a computer consultancy (before this advice became an order one presumes - i.e. while they could still claim "but this was only advice" with an innocent expression).

In a similar way WM-data Sweden seems to have been very hands-off as regards to the Finnish subsidiary (and in return the Finnish subsidiary very hands-off in respect to the Swedish mother). This seems to be mainly due to the fact that Finland has consistently provided the largest profit margins of any part of WM-data *including Sweden* (see the WM-data company reports for the past several years) whereas Denmark and especially Norway have made until recently consistent losses leading to them being more closely monitored by the centre and to them (now and again) having Swedes flown in to take over and try to sort things out.

One other reason for the lack of direct head-office control over the Finnish subsidiary is that the Finnish subsidiary from being a ten men and a dog typical branch office of a foreign company (which it was when I arrived in Finland) has expanded via the acquisition (and occasional selling) of various purely Finnish companies into a virtually stand-alone *Finnish* company and typical for the relationship between Finns and Swedes is what one could term the ice-hockey match mentality - i.e. it's more an "us versus them" thing than a partnership thing.

My last company here got a couple of experts from Sweden to help them get used to working with the new Swedish mother company. They were initially given a decent office as befitted their status in the mother company but within a month were relegated to a small airless room without a window and were henceforce virtually completely ignored until one of them gave up commuting Monday-Friday to Finland and went back to his old job in Sweden having (because he hadn't been allowed to) achieved nothing during his time in Finland. You got the impression that the Finnish management was saying loud and clear "you may be our bosses now but there's no way we're letting you interfere in matters concerning Finland" (or perhaps not so loud and clear!).

My impression from the web cast given by LogicaCMG for analysts (still available on their web site) is that the view LogicaCMG's management have of WM-data is very much one based on conversations with Swedes. If so it will be completely inaccurate as far as the relationship between the Swedish "mother company" and the Finnish subsidiary is concerned as it will no doubt be about how the Swedes think it is rather than the reality on the ground.

[An interesting sidebar here is that SKF used to always have a person from head office seconded to the subsidiary (usually in a key role in the finance department). His job was to understand what was going on internally in that subsidiary and report back. The same method, I noticed, was used in Eli Lilley as I saw when I briefly worked for their German subsidiary. As far as I know this is a method that WM-data have never applied to their subsidiaries. Certainly I've never heard of a Swede working for WM-data Finland on a permanent basis and anyway without knowledge of the Finnish language (which virtually no Swedes have unless they have a Finnish background) they wouldn't be able to snap up anything useful (from corridor talk). ]

It'll be interesting to see if LogicaCMG management ever wake up to the fact that they have bought companies in four different markets rather than the single centrally-controlled company they seem to think they have bought. Certainly the fact that they already had 60 people in an office in Stockholm will not help them in any way in understanding the Finnish subsidiary as those people will just be as "capital city, Sweden" biased as the WM-data Swedish top management - perhaps even more so; WM-data does have a not-insubstantial network throughout Sweden and are thus forced, in Sweden, to look beyond the capital city.)

But then maybe they'll not get the chance. There are still various legal and other hurdles to jump before the purchase becomes final.

In some ways it's nice that Finland has four clear seasons and doesn't have the same kind of weather all year round.

But as always with this kind of thing, it would be nice to be able to dictate the length of the various seasons. At the moment (and unless the greenhouse effect changes things more rapidly than we expect today) there are two short seasons (Spring and Autumn/Fall); one medium length season (Summer) and one far too long season (Winter). In fact we could even make a further distinction and say that Spring is very short and Autumn just short as that's more like the truth of it.

Anyway now, while Southern France is no doubt still enjoying beach life, summer is over and despite occasional flourishes like yesterday it's over for good and within a month or so we'll be wondering when the first snow is going to come (usually 1st November is a good bet).

But this piece is actually more about Summer and the effect a short summer has on you.

The first thing is that there's a general lifting of spirits when summer finally gets here. People tend to smile more and generally be friendlier to strangers.

The second thing is that there is a constant awareness (if you've lived here through earlier summers) that summer, once started, will soon be gone. This can, if you're not careful lead to you spending far too much of your time on one summer activity to the extent that the summer looking back is a big blur.

In my case there has been at least one summer when I did virtually nothing else in my non-work time then canoeing (to get up to 1,000 kms in 3 months) and sleep (tiring work, canoeing). Another (pre-canoeing) year I had 100 golf rounds. Now I try to combine both of those activities with lazy days or even with shopping days or use a free day to get rid of some unneeded stuff from the house which is easy enough when the weather is bad but torture when it doesn't rain for weeks.

"Torture" because at the back of your mind you know that every year as soon as you get to the end of August it's no longer going to be much fun canoeing and once you're passed the middle of September the same can be said for golf (and most other outdoor activities with walking lasting until it's really icy underfoot).

So throughout the Finnish summer there's always the feeling you should be doing something else - making use of the warm weather in a different way - and a constant balancing of activities to try to achieve something of an inner balance.

Something I doubt they ever have in California....

P.S. To prove how this "end of summer" wears on your mind here, you just have to look at these blogs. I now see that I already wrote a piece on the end of summer in late August. Luckily the main thrust of this piece was different, but still.

Readers are referred to the previous blog article for the general details of how transport in the Helsinki area is organised and for the meaning of the 0, 1, and 2 options. They were correct.

What wasn't correct was the information about the new L and 3 buttons which was taken directly from a short information piece in the main Swedish language paper (in Finland) Hufvudstadsbladet (Hbl) using information issued by the Swedish language branch of the Finnish press bureau.

What seems to have happened is that the Swedish language branch of the Finnish press bureau translated a piece of information issued by the regional traffic authority incorrectly and Hbl in picking up the translation rather than looking at the origional text made public this error.

The reason I was able to spot this was that two days later, the main Finnish language paper (Helsingin Sanomat) printed half a page (with pictures) on the same subject. They of course were able to use the original news release and so we see that -

the L option is for travel in the "local area" (i.e. travel from and too any of Kerava, Vantaa, Espoo(incl. Kauniainen) and Kirkkonummi) that doesn't include Helsinki. Nothing to do with trains at all except for travel within Kirkkonummi where this "ticket" is restricted to train travel only (in Kirkkonummi)

the 3 option is then for travel within those same (L) areas but which also incorporates travel within Helsinki.

Perhaps more interesting is to how this mess-up in information came about.

The Finnish text says

L käyttävät Espoossa, Kauniaisessa, Vantaalla, Keravalla and Kirkkonummen junaliikenteessä.

or

L is used "in Espoo", "in Kaunianen", "in Vantaa", "in Kerava", and "in the trains of Kirkkonummi"

(note that "in Espoo"  is one word in Finnish)

This is very clear - in the trains applies only to Kirkkonummi because only there do you have "of" before the name of the area.

The Swedish faulty "translation" (as used by Hbl - but using Finnish placenames in my translation) was however

Med L-knappen kan man köpa en värdebiljett i tågtrafiken i Esbo, Grankulla, Vanda, Kervo och Krykslätt

or

With  the L button you can buy a "value ticket" in the train traffic in Espoo, Kauniainen, Vantaa, Kerava and Kirkkonummi.

Here, there is a restriction to trains for all the areas.

Yet another case of "you can't believe what you read in the papers". Some people don't take both newspapers so will be stuck thinking that L is only available in trains.

Apart from the rather expensive option of actually buying bus tickets from the bus/tram driver or train conductor when you get on the bus/tram (or are on the train), there's the more usual option of electronically putting money into your smart card.

There are two main choices.

A) You can put money as money (!) on your card and gradually use the card money for journeys. This is roughly the same as buying your bus (etc.) ticket from the driver but is at a slightly cheaper rate and is more convenient.

B) You can put money as a time period on your card. This gives you the right to use buses (etc.) in either one local authority or (at roughly double the cost) all local authorities (Helsinki, Vantaa, and Espoo[including Kauniainen]) for a specified time.

Earlier this was for 30 day periods starting from the day you bought the ticket but now with smart cards you can specify both a start day and a finish day when paying. The only limit is that there is a minimum period of (I think) about a week.

The pricing for this is that there is a start-up cost so things get cheaper per day the longer the period is. But you also have to consider days (like weekends and public holidays) when you might well not use a bus (etc.) when working out which ending date you want.

I tend to always start on Mondays and finish on Fridays (not the same week - see above) and either end when there is a public holiday on the Monday following or when there is a holiday period (Easter; Christmas) or even (naturally) before I go away on holiday.

In the A) case when you board a bus (etc.) you choose between 0 (tram only - single ride); 1 (the local authority you are in now -with transfer right) and 2 (you are going to cross a local authority boundary in the course of your journey - otherwise the same as 1). The price naturally rises from 0 to 1 to 2.

The system is a bit crazy in that if you have pressed 1 but then later change to another bus going to another local authority and thus press 2, you will be charged both the full price for 1 *and* the full price for 2 even though the system knows of course that you have already been charged for 1. This is a hangover from the old system of tickets where if you had a 30-day ticket for one local authority but wanted to go to another one, then you would need to buy a 2-zone ticket even though you'd paid already for one zone. (and this also applies to the smart card B) type "ticket").

----------------------

The only reason you're getting all this here and now is because the smart card readers are being changed. As if 0,1,2 was not enough (and I've had my card brush against 1 when I wanted to press 2 thus leading to extra costs for me) we will now have L and 3 buttons.

L is for paying for a ticket for the train and 3 is "for a ticket that is also valid in Helsinki".

This latter needs an explanation. The further outlying areas of Kerava (to the north) and Kirkkonummi (to the west) are joining the system. They will of course pay more and they will have two choices - either come to helsinki by train (only = don't then go further by bus/tram) or come to helsinki by train and then carry on the journey via bus/tram.

What I don't understand is why all the readers are being updated. Surely they only need these new ones on the trains? But that isn't what the article says.

P.S. It's come to me. They can also come to Helsinki by bus. But surely only *those* buses and the train need the L possibility (although transport even in Helsinki will need the 3 possibilty just in case one of these "country" people *start* their journey home on a local (to Helsinki or Espoo or Vantaa) bus/tram).

P.P.S. There are only trams in Helsinki. For the moment there is also a metro (forgotten above) in Helsinki but Espoo are about to decide whether to extend it into their area (where there is a good network of direct buses to Helsinki already)

In England traffic roundabouts are usually when two busy roads cross each other and you want to have the traffic sort itself out rather than have traffic lights. They are quite often in South East England especially when two dual carraigeways cross, but also on a smaller scale in small towns when perhaps one road merges with another at an angle.

Mostly I've seen a logical reason for them.

In Finland they seem to be almost a mode item.

In the summer I drove in a small town called Jämsä. The main road by-passed the town and there was one roundabout on it for the benefit of feeder traffic. However when you got onto that much less important road (which also by-passed the town) with little traffic and unimportant roads joining it there was a sequence of another three roundabouts none of which seemed to have much point.

Where I live in Espoo (just outside Helsinki but still a built-up area) they are in the process of building two roundabouts.

One is a place that had traffic lights before (that never caused any problems) and is where two very minor roads join a slightly less minor road (which does get a reasonable amount of traffic). The traffic lights coped well enough except for maybe 15 mins a day ....   I doubt if the roundabout will help in that 15 or so mins.

The other is on the road near my house that *used* to - in parts (but not that part) - be full of traffic at rush hours but which nowadays (after a motorway addition got most of most of the cars) has been narrowed; made a 40kms zone (with a single speed bump at one end [but for both directions]); and so has much less traffic than ever before. That roundabout is being built where there are side roads leading to residential housing and where there have never been any traffic lights before - nor have they ever been needed.

It seems like the local council having done all the cycle lanes it can is now using its people (and my tax money) to do really unnecessary things.

Or maybe they are taking part in a non-publicised "who has the most unnecessary roundabouts in Finland" competition. They'll need a few more to beat Jämsä.