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Three Finns and a bottle of vodka. They drink in silence for three hours.

After three hours, one Finn says: “Nice vodka.”

The other Finn says, “Did we come here to talk, or did we come here to drink?!”

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Mayakovsky was acting like an avantgarde artist (or, as  we call it in my country, an arsehole) before the Revolution at a dinner, and a Finnish diplomat eventually broke down in tears and yelled like a wounded walrus, in broken Russian, Много! “Too much.” I always found that scene very poignant.

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Best education system in the world, even if Sam Seaborn says so: they pay their teachers gajillions, and even respect them.

They reinvented themselves from a dependency on forests to a high tech hub. Nokia, rest in peace.

I had a cousin work for Nokia a while back. There was no point ringing central office in Helsinki in July: everyone was south for the holidays.

Uralic language. Long agglutinated words. Gemination, which means the language sounds a bit like Dothraki.

Swedish minority, including Sibelius and Linus. And that kickarse general dude, who recorded Hitler.

Lordi, Santa Claus impersonators. Lakes.

Got out of the Russian Empire just in time. Had to be careful with how they handled their Eastern neighbour. Gave the Red Army what for.

They sneer at Greece these days, but then again, all of Northern Europe does.

How’d I do?

Answering as a Greek.

The Greek humorist Freddy Germanos (Φρέντυ Γερμανός, Freddie Germanos), God rest him, visited Denmark in the ’60s. This was his take on OP’s question (Ταξίδι στην Δανία, from the collection Το Δις Εξαμαρτείν):

The first thing you work out in Scandinavia is that the Danes do not adore the Swedes and the Norwegians, the Swedes do not adore the Danes and the Norwegians, and the Norwegians do not adore the Danes and the Swedes.

The Swedes will not forgive the Danes for Sweden once being their colony. The Danes will not forgive the Swedes for Sweden no longer being their colony.

The Norwegians don’t like the Danes because they beat them in soccer. The Danes don’t like the Norwegians because they have a lot of mountains. The Danes and the Norwegians don’t like the Swedes because they have a lot of money.

[…]

When a car and a bicycle cross paths, the car goes back. When a car and a bicycle cross paths with a dog, the car and bicycle go back. The dog is a sacred animal in Denmark.

In general all animals are sacred in Denmark, so long as their blood is not contaminated with Swedish or Norwegian blood.

[…]

The Danish national inferiority complex is that they have no mountains. Their tallest mount is the Mountain of Heaven in Jutland, which is 157 m tall.  Danes say proudly, “It’s a wonderful view from there”.

Norwegians, who have a surfeit of tall mountains, usually reply: “Of course it’s a wonderful view. So long as you stand on a chair.”

In the vernacular: νονός or νουνός. From a Hellenistic word νόννος ~ νέννος, which could mean dad, uncle, or granddad (Wiktionary says the Hellenistic word in turn is from Latin nonnus).

“The Godfather. One of the greatest best sellers of all time”. (Yes, Best Seller is untranslated. Why do you ask?)

In the language of the church: ἀνάδοχος, “guarantor”.  In Modern Greek the term has been extended to sponsor of a child:

“Sponsor a child in Palestine.”

Allow me to write a more general answer.

The phonotactics of a language, and the conventions of its spelling, can lead  speakers to expect letters to be pronounced differently in different contexts—for example, at the start or at the end of a word.

Truncation, in words like (re)frig(erator), takes a sound from the start or middle or end of a word, and makes it a new word. So [ɹɛfrɪdʒəɹeɪda] becomes [frɪdʒ].

But when you come to spelling that truncation, you find that keeping the old spelling can be misleading in its new context (which is after all, a brand new and unfamiliar word). So as both other respondents have written, you can’t spell  [frɪdʒ] as (re)frig(erator) > frig: <g> at the end of a word in English is always [ɡ], so you have to add a final <e>.

Moreover, English typically spells final [dʒ] as <dge>. Plain <ge> does exist, particularly in old –age loans from French; but an unfamiliar word ending in <ige> could be taken for a recent loan from French, and pronounced in the recent French fashion: [ʒ]. Even if that risk didn’t exist, spelling will prefer the usual <dge> pattern anyway, because familiarity in spelling is important (and when deciphering unfamiliar new words, we need all the help we can get).

Australian English truncates words a lot, and has to deal with this issue. The truncation of breakfast can’t be breakie: the shortening of the <ea> is irregular, and wouldn’t be extended to the new word. So it’s usually spelled brekkie. The truncation of poverty can’t be povo, because English shortens long vowels on the third syllable back, not the second; so it is spelled povvo instead, with the double consonant indicating that the first <o> is short. Ditto Seppo as the truncation of Septic Tank = Yank = American.

Traditionally in Europe: religion. As a more general answer than religion, which covers the other answers here: culture. Scripts comes from a particular culture, and adherents of that culture adopt that script. If speakers of the same language belong to different cultures, they use different scripts. If there is a massive cultural shift in the language community, then everyone shifts script.

The critical thing to note here: writing is a cultural artefact, much more thoroughly than language is. So it does not pattern with language, and can change even more quickly. It can change by fiat, or by proselytism, more quickly than language does.

So three hundred years ago, Greek Orthodox Christians wrote Greek in the Greek script; Greek Jews wrote Greek in Hebrew script; Greek Muslims wrote Greek in Arabic script; and Greek Catholics wrote Greek in Roman script. Four hundred years ago, Orthodox Cretan authors wrote Greek in Roman script too—because they were writing Renaissance plays influenced by Italian culture, and all their Ancient Greek references were via Italian. The Orthodox churchmen in Crete at the same time were writing in Greek script.

Ditto Albania, with the added mess that some Albanians made up their own scripts. Coming up with a single Albanian alphabet was a necessary step to having Albanian nationalism override  the credal identities of Albanian subcommunities.

Hence what used to happen with Serbian, Croatian, and Bosnian. It flabbergasts me that Serbs also use the Roman alphabet, but that’s about a new culture (or religion): Westernism. Which is also why Turkey switched to Roman.

Hence also the merry-go-round of scripts in the former Soviet Union. Arabic (Islam); then Latin (Westernism); then Cyrillic (Sovietism); then Latin again (Pan-Turkism).

Chinese Traditional vs Simplified is partly about culture (rejection of the past), though of course many of the simplified characters are older cursive forms, so they’re hardly made up out of thin cloth. There  was some Westernising enthusiasm around Pinyin, but certainly not enough to displace the ideographic script.

Modern Greek: like everyone else said, ηθοποιός. In Ancient Greek this meant “character-building”. The modern meaning came about because plays can be character building, I suppose, but I can’t find out when the meaning shift happened. Pretty sure it’s very recent.

The word is from katharevousa. The old vernacular word is θεατρίνος, which is still around in its pejorative meaning of “drama queen; impostor”.

Like the Ancient word for actor.

Oh, what’s the Ancient word for actor, you ask?

hypokritɛ́ːs.

You recognise that word, don’t you?

Hm.

I know nothing of Russian (Я не знаю ничево в русскаям языкам… which proves my point); but the same polysemy occurs in Greek, and Philip Newton’s answer to Greek (language): Why do we say “παρακαλώ” when answering the phone or saying ‘you’re welcome’? makes sense to me: “please don’t mention it” (“please don’t abase yourself so much as to thank me”).

Intriguingly, the African American use of Nigga please! goes in the completely opposite direction: not an expression of humility, but of exasperation (“please don’t offend my honour/my common sense”)

Emil Manukyan is right about words meaning lots of things depending on their context, though it’s an exaggeration to say it could mean whatever you want: the  meaning is still traceable back to “being well-disposed”.

But don’t quote Saussure, that’s just vague theoretical underpinnings. The way to make sense of this is conversational implicature. As in so much else about language, it was Grice that led the way on this.

Hm.

I keep disagreeing that you’d understand all of the New Testament. Mark and John, sure; Paul, not so much.

Byzantine learned literature: forget it. It’s not identical to Attic Greek, but you’ll need Attic Greek (and a decoder ring) to make sense of it.

Byzantine Vernacular literature (1100  onward): sure, but knowing some dialect, e.g. Cypriot or Cretan will help a lot.

Attic. No. Worse, you’ll think that you understand it, and you’ll be wrong.

Homeric. As I love to say, it might as well be Albanian.

Faleminderit!

The answers given here have opened up a secondary conundrum.

It’s uncontroversial that Turkish got the word from Bulgarian.

The controversy is whether the Slavic word came from Greek, the Greek word came from Slavic, or the similarity is a coincidence.

The Greek word could easily have come from Bulgarian; and if it’s a Slavic-wide  word, that would seem likelier. There were pathways for Greek words into Russian through the Church and the prestige of the Byzantine emperors; so a word for royal garments could have made it. In fact, I was astonished to find the Byzantine clothing φουφούδιον, which I couldn’t find in any Greek dictionaries, has made it as an internet meme in Russia: Фофудья (интернет-мем) — Википедия  (it’s a satire of Byzantine-flavoured hypernationalism.)

But what does the Greek evidence say?

βυσσινί for “purple” is a late inflection, it doesn’t count.

Trapp’s dictionary (LBG, Late Byzantine) has words for purple starting with βυσσιν- from the 12th century (βυσσινόχρους, βυσσινός), and a variant βυσσικός from the 9th century. The variant βυσσικός is said to refer to ὀπός, “juice”, which is suspicious. But none of these words directly refer to cherries. And βυσσικ- points away from vishne, and towards the classical derivation from byssos.

Liddell-Scott gives two definitions of βύσσινος: made of linen, already in Herodotus, and also, as the neuter βύσσινον, in the Bible (Ezra 1:6, Rev 19:8); and in Hesychius’ dictionary, meaning purple (πορφυροῦν). Hesychius preserves lots of very very ancient words. But Hesychius also has lots of more modern words—it’s an utter jumble; and my suspicion is, it’s just a recording of the Byzantine word. Hesychius was supposed to have been compiled in the 6th century, but nothing prevented later interpolations.

Kriaras’ dictionary (Early Modern) has the word βύσσινον (1638), but only in the vernacular translation of Revelations meaning “linen”, so it doesn’t really count either.

So, as far as I can tell, in Greek:

• Byssinon meaning linen is ancient
• Vyssinos meaning purple is mediaeval; possibly pre-Slavic contact, more likely post-, but still likelier to be explained by purple linen than by cherries
• Visino meaning cherry is suspiciously absent in texts older than 1600.

Hypothesis A: the shift “purple” > “cherry” happened in the Middle Ages, and was transmitted with its new meaning from Greek to Bulgarian to Russian—despite there being no evidence of the new meaning in Greek before 1600. The Balto-Slavic cognates that other respondents have mentioned should be ignored.

Hypothesis B: the meaning “cherry” came from Bulgarian vishne reasonably late, and was mapped onto the preexisting word visino, which happened to mean “purple”. (Although given Greek phonotactics, visino is the only way you could pronounce vishne in Greek anyway.) The proximity of “purple” to “cherry” is the coincidence.

Nasty when you get a battle of coincidences like that. I’m inclined to Hypothesis B.  But that’s kneejerk anti-nationalist of me. Interested in others’ opinion.

Or, for those that prefer the IPA, [kaliˈnixta].

Modern Greek. Actually, I have no idea if there is an Ancient Greek word for “good night”…