I don't know how it is in Finnish, but in Japanese I think of it as interchangeable. I wouldn't say Japanese don't have "L" or "V', just that L and V are largely interchangeable with R and B.

If you're not used to it and have a name like Beverley (for example), it will take some getting used to, but I think many people would adapt to it quicker than they realize.

Bak is certainly recognizable in bacon with your etymology, from Swedish.

I would as such recommend German over Finnish - they do have "die Finsternis" and +100 M speakers, as opposed to Finns with some 5 M, albeit charming, speakers and some celebrity fans such as JRR Tolkien. ;-)

We do not naturally have soft vowels - but we can - "la politesse oblige."

Bulvaani.

This is a fabulous Finnish word loaned from Russian - which designates an impotent front-man in business dealings, a dummy.

Thy wish is my command :-)

Sorry, German only.

Friedrich Kluge, Etymologisches Wörterbuch der deutschen Sprache. Bearb. von Elmar Seebald. 24., durchgesehene und erweiterte Auflage. Berlin ; New York : de Gruyter, 2002, S. 295 zu finster:

Actually, it's derived from <i>robotnik</i>, the Czech word for slave, as first used by Karel Capek in his 1920s play "R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots)". Asimov was merely building on what Capek started.

and as a sidenote - the "slaves" in R.U.R. were not robots, but closer to androids or clones. Asimov did actually create the term for a mechanical being, though it was not his intention. Roboti does not mean slave, by the way, but worker (or something similar...) - so the title of the play translate to something like "Rossum's Universal Workers"

Ah. That makes sense. Fair enough; I concede the point.

Considering the time period in which it was written — less than a decade after the Bolshevik Revolution — it makes sense that Capek was exploring the theme of a specially created, dedicated working class with no real option for advancement. Aldous Huxley would take it one step further in Brave New World, with his idea of Epsilons that were specially bred to be good for little more than grunt labor.

What made Asimov's robots unique is that they had the inherent intelligence to be much more, but were still trapped by the sociopolitical fears of a society that wasn't about to make room for an intellectual co-equal, much less a superior. Though that did eventually change as well; you might even say it became the foundation for some of his later work.

Sehr schön, vielen Dank! :-D

I can sort of see the dunkel-dinster-finstar to Finsternis linkage, but it is rather a leap and bound to my mind from temes-ra though! Very poetic word, and I think, very ur-German, too.

I kind of like the German word "Fanal". It would translate as "beacon" to english (as in "beacon of hope") but only in German it has this certain ring to it.

fancy words are cool, they make and keep a language from being dumbed down too much.

The words i dont like (in any language) are the "filler words" when used excessively and without particular reason.

http://www.examiner.com/article/um-filler-words-and-like-how-they-function-uh-language-you-know

I see what you did there ;-)

Ristel von Fistel Blabver. Famous Dutch count named after a nasty type of skin infection.

Really? Where are they from? Thinking about the root of jovial, I'm guessing it's derived from Roman mythology. According to Merriam-Webster the origin of serene is: So not so much literature for that one. Both words date back hundreds of years though. I was hoping for more modern examples.

No, that one's a real word, going back to Victorian England; Gladstone supposedly used it, though I cannot find it in his works. More likely it was used by others to describe his position; early in his career, he was a vocal opponent of the movement to disestablish the Church of England.

Defenestration is another grand old word. There were two notorious acts of defenestration in Prague, Pražská defenestrace, whence the word in other languages. The first, in 1419, started the Hussite Wars; the second, in 1618, started the Thirty Years' War. (To be fair, conditions would have boiled over into war soon enough, but throwing the opposition out the window does escalate an already nasty situation.)

[Walt Kelly, "Late Early Poop on the Jack Acid"]
"Yes! Defenestrate him in the tradition of our country! Justice to all traitors!"
"Don't defenestrate him! Throw him out the window! Justice is too good for him!"