> > The "Fun with words" feature reminded me of a joke I read in a Finnish magazine.
> >
> > A girl in school is doing a presentation about ponies. "The pony is easy to take care of", she says, "it doesn't eat much more than a schäfer per day."
> > "How do you feed it?" asks a boy, "Do you just throw the schäfer into its pen?"
>
> Does this make sense in Finnish?
>
> Stephen

That word didn't look Finnish -- a quick check of a German dictionary yielded the information that it means "shepherd" and that "schäferhund" means "German shepherd".

After that, a quick search for "schäfer" on google.fi on only pages in Finnish yields two results on the first page where it's accompanied by pictures of dogs (of course, I can't read Finnish, so I'm not sure whether the other eight are referring to dogs), leading me to think that Finns sometimes use this German word to refer to German shepherds. (Also, one of those two links has what is almost certainly a pedigree chart -- it certainly has a family-tree-like structure -- and the other is captioned "beagle-schäfer".)

Perhaps Joona assumed that, since the word "schäfer" was borrowed into Finnish to refer to the dog, that it was also borrowed into English? (In much the same way, I've seen English-speakers assume that speakers of other languages were familiar with "ā la mode", when in fact it was only English-speakers who borrowed that phrase from the French -- and not only that, but in French it means "in style" while English-speakers use it to mean "with ice cream".)

At any rate, once you realize that "schäfer" is a kind of animal, the joke makes sense.

Lucky "I now have two webpages in Finnish open in other windows" Wizard