Language recognition

This is not about recognizing what was said. It's about recognizing what language was spoken.

HS reports that a woman was raped in Helsinki, and the perpetrators were speaking either Russian or Romanian.

I'm rather suspicious of this detection of language. Of course, first of all, there is the point that reports of abductions and rapes aren't always entirely to be trusted (sometimes they are made up); secondly, there is the point that yes, women do have a right to do anything and not get raped. Women should be able to go in the middle of a night to a strange van, driven by completely unknown men speaking an unknown language, and not get raped - but still, why on earth should a woman take risks like that? I don't get it. But here my attention mainly goes to the claim that the language was Russian or Romanian. How does she know?

I claim to be rather good at languages; I find it easy - more easy than most people I know - to pick up elementaries of a language that is new to me, and understand bits and make myself understood. But as I haven't traveled in Eastern Europe, I don't stand a chance in recognizing Central and East European Slavic languages apart from each other, and telling which is which. Polish or Chech or Croatian, Slovakian or Slovenian or Serbian or Sorbian, Bulgarian or Macedonian. To me, they all resemble Russian a little bit; I do realize they're not actually Russian, but if someone speaks Ukrainian or Belarusian, I can't tell those apart from dialects of Russian, nor from Polish. From written language I can deduct more, starting from the alphabet used: Cyrillic or Latin, and how prolific it is with consonants - the Polish are poor and cannot afford vowels.

I can pick which one is Hungarian, because that is entirely different. I know a number of Hungarians and have heard them speak, and when I go to a public space like a railway station in Budapest, although I don't understand a word of what is being said around, the tone and note of speech is somehow familiar - the relationship of this Fenno-Ugric language to Finnish is somehow evident to me.

But we should realize that Romanian does not belong to the group of Slavic languages, either. It is a Romanic language and resembles French or Italian much more than Russian.

So how come the woman can say that the language spoken by rapists was Russian or Romanian? She (or the police) may of course think of Romanians because there has been so much talk about Romanian beggars and thieves in Finland, and Russians are always good suspects for anything bad here, but I'm afraid the guilt was passed far too easily. If she says Russian or Romanian, the linguistical distance between these two is fairly big and most of Europe lies in between. The men could have been speaking some other Slavic or Romanic language - like those listed above, or Romansh spoken in Switzerland, or Romani (Gypsy). Or they could have been speaking Albanian, which is also an Indo-European language (as most European languages are, except Fenno-Ugric languages and Basque). Or, who knows, Greek, as the saying in English goes that "this is all Greek to me". (When applying the same proverb, Finns refer to Hebrew).

Perhaps the only safe statement she could have made would have been that the men spoke "an European language that was strange to me", and the part about European is probably a bit uncertain, since it might just as well have been e.g. Turkish or Kurdish. Not very appropriate to pinpoint Russians or Romanians only.

Naturally, the responsibility for this is more with the newspaper and the police than the poor woman, who was probably shocked. If things happened like it was reported, she was violated, and that was wrong. But still, the linguistic method to point out who did it doesn't really work out so easily, and mostly seems to reflect currently popular prejudices.

A problem in the judiciary

Professor Martti Koskenniemi criticizes politicians and bureaucrats for inaction with the Finnish "grandma problem", where elderly parents of long-time immigrants and citizens are deported from the country, sometimes in ways that seem to be very unfair. Politicians have promised to rework the law, but they have been slow in guiding the ministry. The police and immigration authorities have delayed the deportations in anticipation of law changes, but now they are starting to feel that they can no longer ignore their duties and legally valid decisions passed by courts of law.

I think Koskenniemi is misguided, or worse, dishonest. He criticizes the legislative and the executive, while the actual heartless party is the judiciary. In some way it is of course understandable that Koskenniemi criticizes others, not his own profession, but as said, to me this sounds dishonest. Reminds me of the old saying about crows not picking the eye of another crow.

Let's elaborate. The classic Montesquieuean separation of state powers is that the legislative (politicians, parliament) passes laws, the judiciary (judges and lawyers) interprets them, and the executive (bureaucrats, including police) implements. In some banana republics, it is not unheard of that El Presidente tells a court what to decide, or tells a ministry official to bypass the law, or even invents a new law ad hoc. But in established democracies, the separation of state powers is a strong tradition. It would be really scary if the bureaucrats were taking direct orders from the president or the prime minister, bypassing laws and their interpretation as established by courts.

Our administrational courts have come across criticism both ways, for being too strict and being too lenient, and I think both criticisms can be valid at the same time.

It's inconceivable that constantly reoffending criminals cannot be deported. One obvious example is the infamous Ibrahim Shkupolli, who I mentioned before. Although he was routinely violating restraint orders, the police never even proposed to deport him because they knew such an initiative would have the chances of a snowball in hell. It's big news that one (1) Somalian constantly-repeating offender was deported, and even he gives interview statements where he vows to return - and plenty of hapless "no borders" activists seem to be willing to help him.

It is also inconceivable that at a time when most front-line politicians speak very favourably of immigration, particularly job-related immigration, we're not taking into account that immigrants are not just workforce, immigrants are people. They're humans. The people don't come out from void: they have background, history, they have families. If you bring the bread-winner of a family to Finland, the family will eventually be dependent on this person and the family wants to live together and take care of each other. There's no such thing as a purely job-related immigration without families (unless you do it in the Dubai way, which we would consider serious exploitation).

The centerpiece of the "grandma problem" is heartless courts. The problem is not the legislative or even the current law - which could allow people like Eveline Fadayel, Irina Antonova or Marina Senchishak to stay with their family members in Finland, if the courts just decided to read what it says in paragraph § 52 of the Immigration Act. Also, the problem isn't the bureaucrats or the police. I have noticed the police are well aware that if they forcefully remove a sick, elderly person from her bed or wheelchair, tie her to a stretcher and dump across the border, this person is as good as dead, whatever Vladimir Putin says about good care of the elderly in Russia.

Come on: in the case that I know, the old person had a distinctly visible skin cancer, in fact a huge bulb, in her head. The Russian care of the elderly never noticed it - the person herself couldn't say anything because she unable to speak, or to be precise, her Finnish daughter is the only person who can understand her speech after brain hemorhage. The Russian care of the elderly never even met her, because she was starving in her flat, bed-ridden in her own stench, until her daughter managed to take care of her in Finland (and arrange the cancer operation at a private doctor, at no cost to the taxpayer - credits to the doctor who barely charged expenses, not to speak of anything close to a regular market price in private healthcare).

There has to be a limit. We cannot take everyone aboard in a welfare state; the line of needy people in world is endless and way beyond our resources. But when we are drawing the line, I think it is fair to say that it would be inhuman if we have a person who has come to the country over 20 years ago, married, learned the Finnish language, worked hard to make a living, raised her children to be Finnish-speaking Finns, but still wants to take care of her elderly mother - and then this mother should be left across the border to rot and die.

Cousin marriages

An interesting immigration-related artifact about Britain, by The Times:
"Fifty-five per cent of British Pakistanis are married to first cousins and in Bradford the figure is 75 per cent."

Now, the occasional marriage with a first cousin is nothing extraordinary in the history of mankind, and generally not a big deal: risk for genetic disorders doubles, but you could say in mathematical terms that doubling an ε (an insignificantly small number) still gives you an ε. Many of us, including myself, have that in the background of our families. But is it okay to have a sub-culture where the rate of cousin marriages is this high, and repeated over generations? There the risks multiply and multiply; the ε becomes something else, something which is not insignificant.

It actually becomes very visible in the statistics for recessive genetic diseases, and if the cousin marriages will continue, then at least genetic screening (preferably prior to the arranged marriage) becomes necessary. As far as I understand, this is actually becoming more and more common in the wealthiest Arab communities in Middle East - but it won't be feasible for every village in Pakistan, and I'm afraid it won't be feasible for Bradford either, or Vuosaari.