h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

An elk running through Helsinki has made the headlines.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/blogs-news-from-elsewhere-27780337

From that report, "One man says the elk ran in front of his car on his way to work before dashing into the bushes, nearly causing what's known in Finland as a hirvikolari - a specific type of road accident involving an elk."

And so, the Finns have separate words for road accidents involving different animals.

I wonder what the English equivalents might be?

(over to you...)

Well, in the rural US, fatal vehicular-animal collisions often result in what we call 'road kill'. There are recipes...

1001 words to describe the rain, maybe?

I'm sure someone will correct me if I'm wrong, but I seem to recall that the Inuit have an impressive number of words for snow (falling, having fallen recently, having fallen a while back, having frozen over, having melted,...).
And another "cold country" language (couldn't for the life of me remember which, might even be Finnish, for all I know) has many different words for salmon (at sea, up the river, having reproduced or not...)

That's what's fascinating with languages, they describe the reality the speakers know.

We only have a general word for accidents with wild animals involved. Viltolycka. Not for specific animals I think. But the moose accidents suck. They're so huge and heavy, and you hit their legs and they land in your lap...
Reindeer are apparently just daft, and stand around in the road waiting for you to move out of their way.

I wouldn't want a moose in my lap.

Apparently, t hey're road hogs:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i-4p9be2sR4

The Inuit apparently haven't got any more words for snow than you would expect - it's a myth. But it is natural that languages describe everyday occurrences. Finnish is an agglutinative where concepts are expressed by tacking endings onto words ratger than by sticking in lots of small connector words.

It's not surprising that a car/ elk collision might involve less words than English. That's the way the language works.

Amusingly, because the Inuit/Eskimo snow vocabulary thing is such a widely spread misconception that it has become a cliche, a new word was formed to describe other cliced memes, snowclones.
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snowclone

Oh, and note the h2g2 connection in the history section. .

Ah, I didn't realise it could be something as simple as a compound word. The BBC article implied that it had a more specific meaning.

Indeed, Google Translate tells me that Hirvi = Moose and Kolari = Crash.

I guess it may depend on whether there are specific attributes of a moose crash which would make it unlike, say, a caribou crash.

We have a few obvious English differences. Insects 'splat' on the windscreen, birds 'strike', I guess you'd 'hit' a deer...

Maybe I'll check out Swahili - it's bound to have far more variety in terms of large creatures wrapping themselves around your Landrover.

I've never had a cowcrash or a sheepcrash but I've had a few potholedismounts on my bike ...