Klaus Kemelli ja varhaisnykysuomen unohdetut uudistajat

• Petri Lauerma

Avainsanat: fonologia, Kemell, Klaus Juhana, kirjakieli, kääntäminen, morfologia, ortografia, raamatunkieli, tutkimushistoria, vanha kirjasuomi, varhaisnykysuomi

Abstrakti

Klaus Kemelli and the unknown reformers of early modern Finnish (englanti)

4/2001 (105)

Petri Lauerma

KLAUS KEMELLI AND THE UNKNOWN REFORMERS OF EARLY MODERN FINNISH

The long forgotten Klaus Kemelli (1805-1832) was once an admired poet and translator whose Bellman adaptation was especially celebrated by his contemporaries. Kemelli joined the revivalist movement and, towards the end of his short life, translated into Finnish the work by Thomas Kempis entitled On the Imitation of Christ, which was posthumously published in 1836. In this translation Kemelli abandons the language and style of Old Literary Finnish, which was still used especially in religious literature, and writes mainly in the dialects of Central Ostrobothnia and Oulu, which were familiar to him from his childhood and school years. When compared with other books and periodicals published in 1836, it is clear that Kemellis language was not only far less old-fashioned than the other religious writers of the time, but also very nearly as modern as the language of Mehilinen by Elias Lnnrot. Both these writers used forms selected from different dialects, among them some colloquialisms which were later discarded from the evolving Modern Finnish (e.g. Kemellis -ht- instead of -ts-, and Lnnrots plural verb endings -mma and -tta).

Kemellis translation of the Thomas Kempis work became very popular especially in Ostrobothnia. A. W. Ingman, a contemporary theologian and translator of the Bible, claimed that leading local priests abandonded the old religious language and started using folk language in their sermons after the model of Kemelli. The influence of Kemelli is obvious in Ingmans own translations. Various poetical and vernacular traits appearing in some religious writings in the late 1830s can also be traced to Kemellis language rather than that of the Kalevala (1835). Kemelli was unlikely to have been working in isolation, however. On the contrary, he was probably part of the linguistic progress set in motion by the great religious revival of the time, when large numbers of hitherto illiterate peasants mainly from Eastern Finland and Ostrobothnia learned to read and write and the old written language thus began merging with dialects which had no previous literary tradition. The writer concludes that these processes probably played a significant role in the standardization of Early Modern Finnish, although Kemelli and his revivalist contemporaries barely receive a mention in the standard histories of Literary Finnish.