Leena Kolehmainen

Strontium-90 in deciduous teeth in Finland

Deciduous teeth of Finnish children born in 1958-1967 were analysed for strontium-90 by means of Cerenkov radiation. The strontium-90 content was about 9 pCi/gCa in children born in 1963--1964; the values decreased strongly in the subsequent cohorts of children. The strontium-90 content of the deciduous teeth varied in perfect unison with that of cows milk (r=+0.99). The results confirm that deciduous teeth provide a practical and accurate indicator of the total body burden of bone-seeking environmental pollutants.

Strontium content of deciduous teeth in northern and southern Finland

A possible connection has been suggested between strontium and a low prevalence of dental caries. An investigation of this subject was initiated by measuring the strontium content of deciduous teeth by atomic absorption spectrophotometry in different regions in Finland. The material analysed consisted of a total of 2,482 tooth crowns and 392 tooth roots. The results showed that the Sr content of the tooth crowns in northern Finland was about two-fold that in the south, about 400 and 200 mug/gCa, respectively. The difference was apparently caused by corresponding differences in dietary strontium. The tooth roots contained much more Sr than the crowns, about 600 and 200 mug/gCa, respectively, in southern Finland, presumably owing to changes occurring in the dietary habits of the child during the development of the crowns and roots of the deciduous teeth.

Weather and Language

This paper summarizes current findings in the cross-linguistic study of meteorological constructions. It provides both a typology of weather events and a typology of encoding formats used for the expression of weather in and across languages. The discussion shows that there is a correlation between these two parameters: there are clear tendencies in the distribution of the various encoding types across the various event types. This gives rise to a typology of languages which explains linguistic variation in the encoding of meteorological events.

Multilingual Practices in Contemporary and Historical Contexts: Interfaces between Code-Switching and Translation.

Abstract This article serves as an introduction to a collection of four articles on multilingual practices in speech and writing, exploring both contemporary and historical sources. It not only introduces the articles but also discusses the scope and definitions of code-switching, attitudes towards multilingual interaction and, most pertinently, the interfaces between code-switching and translation. The article shows that code-switching and translation share a number of features, yet have rarely been treated together. However, as there is a definite need to examine code-switching phenomena – particularly bilingual reiteration, which not only helps crossing language boundaries but also has other functions – from a variety of perspectives, including translation and interpreting studies, the article encourages closer collaboration between code-switching research and translation studies. It is possible to envisage a continuum of multilingual processes and products, with completely monolingual, untranslated text at one end and multilingual material with code-switching but no reiteration at the other. Along this continuum are a number of intermediate stages characterized by different types of inter-textual and intra-textual translation.

From a spatial adposition to a grammatical relations marker: contact- and context-induced grammaticalization and their interaction

This paper is an investigation of grammatical relations marking that combines the advances of monolingual analysis with cross-linguistic comparison. It examines adpositions as grammatical relations markers and the linguistic change which leads to the rise of adpositional objects from freely insertable spatial adverbials. This study concentrates on the Finnish adposition peraan , ‘after’. An empirical monolingual corpus analysis shows that peraan as a grammatical relations marker is a productive device for argument linking in contemporary Finnish. In a cross-linguistic comparison, the properties of Swedish, German and Finnish adpositional objects with efter , nach and peraan , ‘after’, are studied with regard to the continuum between prototypical freely insertable adverbials and prototypical adpositional objects. A diachronic comparison, in turn, focuses on the development of adpositional objects from spatial adverbials and examines three alternative possibilities for peraan : native grammaticalization, contact-induced grammaticalization and the interaction of both language-internal and -external factors. http://dx.doi.org/10.5128/LV20.04