Lumesadu – ‘tarina’ vai ‘lumikasa’ vai ei kumpikaan? Suomalaiset lukiolaiset viron sanoja tunnistamassa
Lumesadu – ‘tarina’ or ‘lumikasa’ or something completely different? How Finnish senior high school students try to recognize Estonian words

Summary/Abstract: If we want to encourage Estonian and Finnish speakers to engage in multilingual communication, i.e. to use their native languages as a device in mutual interaction, it is important to know as much as possible of its prerequisites. Understanding is essential and therefore this article discusses the ability of Finnish senior high school students to understand Estonian vocabulary without previous knowledge of Estonian. It is hypothesized that the a(nity of the source and target languages may facilitate the recognition but, on the other hand, it also may cause confusion: ‘false friends’ in Estonian are easily adopted for communicative purposes. A list of 35 Estonian words were given to 32 senior high school students. !eir task was to translate those words into Finnish and describe how they ended up choosing their solutions. Obviously, words normally appear in context, but one aim of this test was to #nd out how the lexical elements are conceived, what sort of appearance the Estonian word has. Context, the inner logic of the phrase, would have helped too much in inferring the meaning directly.

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