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Perkele

Finnish swear word; former name of a deity

Summary

Finnish swear word; former name of a deity

Perkele () is a Finnish word meaning 'evil spirit' and a popular Finnish profanity, used similarly to the English phrase God damn, although it is considered much more profane. It is most likely the most internationally known Finnish curse word.

Etymology

The name is of Proto-Indo-European origin; *Perkʷūnos is the reconstructed name of the god of thunder.

Some researchers consider Perkele to be an original name of the thunder god Ukko, the chief god of the Finnish pagan pantheon, but this view is not shared by all researchers. There are related words in other Finnic languages: in Estonian, põrgu means hell, in Karelian perkeleh means an evil spirit.

Influence of Christianity

As Finland was Christianized, the ancient pre-Christian deities came to be regarded as demons. This led to the use of "Perkele" as a translation for "Devil" in the Finnish translation of the Bible. Later, in other translations, the word was rendered as paholainen (the evil one).

References

References

  1. (2006). "Kielitoimiston sanakirja". Kotimaisten kielten tutkimuskeskus.
  2. "How Finns Swear and What This Tells Us About Their Culture".
  3. (4 March 2015). "Finnish swearwords – a list of profanities you shouldn't know".
  4. (2017). "Advances in Swearing Research: New languages and new contexts". John Benjamins Publishing Company.
  5. (2015). "Handbook of Finnish". E-painos.
  6. Salo, Unto. (1990). "Agricola's Ukko in the light of archeology. A chronological and interpretative study of ancient Finnish religion: Old Norse and Finnish religions and cultic place-names.".
  7. "Miten suomalaiset kiroilivat ennen kristinuskoa?".
  8. (1976). "Suomen kielen etymologinen sanakirja. 3.". Suomalais-ugrilainen seura.
  9. "Paholainen".
Wikipedia Source

This article was imported from Wikipedia and is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Content has been adapted to SurfDoc format. Original contributors can be found on the article history page.

finnish-gods thunder-gods profanity finnish-profanity
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