06/22/2019
"9th of April, is one of Finnish flag days. Finnish people love their language so much that they celebrate every April a man who lived 500 years ago. This man was called Mikael Agricola and he is the father of written Finnish.
Agricola was the first person to write Finnish language. He was a clergyman and a bishop. At that time, in the 16th century, the catholic church was operated only in Latin. Agricola studied in Germany and learned from Martin Luther, the father of the protestant reformation, that people should use their own language in church and especially understand the message of the Bible.
So Agricola started a huge task to invent the rules of written Finnish in order to translate the Bible into Finnish. A remarkable thing is that he accomplished the work in three years.
Of course, Agricola didn’t invent Finnish language or grammar rules as such -Finnish and its ancestors had been spoken thousands of years before Agricola’s time. But before Agricola nobody needed to write it."
