A Question For Native Speakers of English

@markkujantunen · 2025-08-04 13:16 · GEMS

Finnish has a wry, sarcastic idiom "Kaikkea se leipä elättää."

The most faithful translation I can think of is "Bread sustains all sorts." This one is really tough to translate.

Such an idiom doesn't exist in the English language as far as I know and the translation may not quite capture the cruelty of the original Finnish idiom when the object is a person. The original refers to sustenance as a biological process. The "kaikkea se..." structure ("kaikkea" = partitive case of "kaikki" = all, "se" = it, "leipä" = bread, "elättää" = sustain) is often used to express irritation or surprise at the existence of a particularly wide range of things. Often in a negative sense. The idea here is that someone's mere existence is contemptible.

#language #finnish #english #idioms
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