#finnish phonology

[mehilaiselokuva]

finnish phonetics??? ? ?

thats it thats the question

I love Finnish phonetics (and phonology!) thanks for the question

Finnish phonetics are straightforward (compared to the phonology and writing, they correspond very well together) but there's a lot that not even a Finnish person would know about it.

(For example; did you know that Finnish has nasalization? Put a finger under your nose and say "nunna". do you feel the air come out from your nostrils? Now say "kukka". The air current doesn't appear. Try to use the <u> of "kukka" in "nunna" and vice versa.)

There's a common misconception where Finnish people will tell you that Finnish is pronounced COMPLETELY as it's written, but that's not the case (we don't even have a separate letter for /ŋ/, which is usually written as <ng> or <nk>) The phoneme <h> in Finnish has 4 (FOUR!!) allophones; [h], [x], [ç] and [ɦ]. Thankfully this is not random and there are rules for where each phone appears.

Then there is the whole thing about older Finnish having no sounds like /b/ and /g/ (sometimes also /d/ is mentioned as it kind of was in old Finnish but at the same time not???) and so some (especially the older generation) speakers might pronounce loan words differently. For example, my grandma would pronounce <disko> something like [ˈtis̠ko̞] while I would say [ˈdis̠ko̞] (the recommended pronunciation)

I could talk about this a lot more but I'll spare your ears (or eyes)

[shro0msquid]

I always seem to get bogged down in phonology when I'm conlanging. I'm so indecisive because I love open syllable structure like in finnish or in greenlandic. But I also like more consonant heavy languages like Haida, Tlingit, or Nuxalk. I think Nuxalk especially has an elegantly maximalist approach to syllable structure.

I'm thinking of verbs being consonant heavy as I plan to make them dense with grammatical information and nouns to have a more open syllable structure.

[yvanspijk]

The Proto-Germanic language is a reconstruction. It's based on the early daughter languages and on what's known about its precursor. Many PG words were borrowed into Finnish. As Finnish is quite conservative, some of them have barely changed. They affirm the reconstructions.

[szappan]

favourite pronunciation of the word year is still jő i wish id attended phonology this year so i could detect whatever merger or split had caused it <3 but i hadn't

[dedalvs]

Sorry if you’ve already answered this somewhere, but what would you recommend as the first words in a conlang? Small numbers? Basic movement verbs? First and second person pronouns?

Not really important beyond it being underived, basic. What is underived or basic in a conlang is conlang-specific. There are tendencies, sure, but there are very few concepts that will without exception be basic in any language. Take "sun", for example. One of the most basic concepts. An immutable fact of life. In Indoensian it's matahari, a compound of mata "eye" and hari "day". In FInnish it's aurinko, part of whose etymology is unknown, but with a very common nominalizatio suffix -nko. Something like the Swadesh list might suggest meanings which have a good shot at being encoded with basic words in a language, but ultimately it's still up to you to decide which words will be basic and which derived.

Whatever they are, though, it seems logical to start with the basic and move onto the derived, unless you're doing one of those "I'm analyzing the sacred words of a mysterious manuscript!" games. They you might be starting off with larger words and figuring out derivations, phonology, etc. as you go.

[drelldreams]

Thinking about humans learning alien languages and vice versa. On one hand, you’d have humans butchering alien languages. Can’t produce the chirping and bellowing sounds of alien languages. Humans trying to speak the turian or krogan language would come out as an incomprehensible mess. Turians speaking human languages wouldn’t be able to pronounce b, m and p due to not having any lips.

On ther hand, you probably have languages with eerily similar phonology by sheer coincidence, so you wpuld have asari who can speak Finnish with a perfect Finnish accent, which leads Finnish speakers to believe the asari’s speech is being translated, but nope! The blue lady is speaking your language!

Maybe some turians would sound just like native German speakers when speaking German, except they leave out every p, m and p and you wonder what the hell your translator is doing.. turns out the turian guy is speaking German.

[outfoxt]

Affixes, Clitics, and Particles

i think that these parts of language are really cool! so im going to try to explain them :D also i definitely did not get sent down an hours long rabbit hole of linguistic papers and i also definitely didn't find out that the reason i wanted to make this post is actually a misconception :D i love ignoring things :D

Affixes:

the wikipedia article for affixes says that "in linguistics, an affix is a morpheme that is attached to a word stem to form a new word or word form."

in hopefully simpler terms, this basically means that an affix is a letter, or a group of letters that form a single sound or syllable, that is attached to a word stem to form a new word or word form.

some examples of these are the somewhat well known prefix and suffix, but also the beloved infix:

prefix: undone suffix: spotless infix: abso-fucking-lutely

sidenote: my favorite thing about english infixes is that they pretty much only work with expletives. in fact, there's a tom scott video about expletive infixations!

Clitics:

wikipedia defines a clitic as such: "a clitic is a morpheme that has syntactic characteristics of a word, but depends phonologically on another word or phrase."

in layman's terms: a clitic is a letter, or a group of letters that form a single sound or syllable, that has the function of a word in a sentence, but depends on another word or phrase based on the sound rules of the language.

a few examples of clitics can be seen in finnish (which also has a great many affixes but we're not talking about those right now):

-ko/kö -han/hän -pa/pä -kin

the spelling of the clitic depends on vowel harmony. if you want to learn more, this dissertation is all about finnish clitics!

you may be asking yourself how to tell the difference between clitics and other parts of speech. well this study has just the thing for you! quite a few tests are suggested by the author of this study if you want to be able to tell if something is a clitic or not, including some of the following:

a phonological test observe how the clitic forms a phonological unit with an independent word. (do not ask me how this one works i dont know) accentual test "clitics are accentually dependent, while full words are accentually independent." put simply, if you can't put stress on it, it's probably a clitic syntactic test a word can stand on its own and be subject to normal word processes such as tense changes while a clitic cannot do this

Particles:

"'Particle' is a cover term for items that do not fit easily into syntactic and semantic generalizations about the language[.]"

read: "particle" is a miscellaneous, catch all term for anything that doesn't fit into the above two categories (or any other word categories like nouns, verbs, etc.)

the author of this study (who i'm going to refer to as Zwicky from now on because it's easier) says that theres no such thing as a particle and that its distinction from affixes, clitics, words, and clauses is unnecessary. i think thats an. interesting take.

anyway even though Zwicky just said theres no such thing as particles (which, how could he do that? theres kids around! we dont want to ruin the magic!) he concedes that there is actually a group of words that are commonly called particles that he agrees are actually particles. but he decides to call them discourse markers instead. because fuck you.

i dont like any of the words that Zwicky included so i made a list of my own:

-ね (ne) eh (canadian english) innit (common transcription of "isn't it", british english)

the funny thing is im coming out of this still not entirely clear on what a particle is. i thought i knew, i did some research, realized i didnt know, and now i'm here. based on how Zwicky puts it, it feels like the category of "particle" exists to accommodate the fact that there might be words* that arent affixes, clitics, words, or clauses but it feels like Zwicky is just being contrary. I should probably have done more research but this post was supposed to be done 24 hours ago.

out of context highlights from my research process: - sanskrit - the panini rule - doch - verbosely long section titles

*i dont actually mean words, i mean a morpheme which is a letter or a group of letters that form the representation of one sound that carries meaning, but i didn't want to make that sentence long and unreadable

if i'm wrong, please tell me! i would appreciate being corrected, i know i am not an expert on this topic in the slightest.

[possessivesuffix]

This is indeed a very interesting question in general, and I don't want to detract too much from it;

…but there is a very short and fairly simple first-order explanation for king versus kuningas too — it's survivorship bias. It's pretty much always this one word specifically that people cite for supposed extreme archaicity. Finnish however has many hundreds of words that date back already as Proto-Germanic or Proto-Scandinavian loans in Proto-Finnic or Common Finnic, and since Finnish phonology & sound changes versus Germanic phonology & sound changes are different ones almost entirely, we can already predict that a few words like this would just by chance end up being preserved far better in Finnish. It's definitely not true that you could take any random Proto-Germanic word and expect to find it in almost the same form in Finnish still. Some other loanwords work more towards the opposite, say the Finnish for 'nail' is naula < *naɣla < *nagla < *nakla, whose Proto-Germanic original is *naglaz and which probably remains still more recognizable in reflexes like German Nagel, Dutch nagel, Swedish nagel. The most archaic reflex this time is maybe rather Faroese naglur. And other words have had several consonants drop off or rounded off as something else in Finnish already by the time of loaning, say Fi. ranta 'shore' (from the Germanic family of strand), even if it has after that remained fairly intact.

The most relevant second-order correction is then then that, while there might be almost as many sound changes happening in Finnish during the last 2000–3000 years as in Germanic, they often happen to be "more minor" — changes that affect e.g. a consonant cluster found in six words or one specific inflectional ending — and the average Finnish word does not accrue as many of them. We already see this in naula: *kl > *gl and *ɣl > *ul are two changes that only affect some dozen or so words (intervening *g > *ɣ has been more major). In general West Germanic *naglaz > *nagl, the loss of the masc. sg. ending *-az affected also thousands of other words in one swoop.

This is also the really big thing that has kept Germanic phonology "in motion": the loss of word-final material, consonants, endings, entire syllables. Something like pre-Germanic *dreibanan turns into Proto-Germanic *drīβanã which turns into West Germanic *drīβan and then surfaces as Old English drīfan, already shorter by one syllable. Another syllable yet drops off towards modern English drive /draiv/. And probably, this kind of a process also sets off more opportunities for other changes — e.g. for /v/ to have become a phoneme distinct from both /b/ and /f/. In Old English it's probably already phonetically [driːvan] but phonologically still /drīfan/, as written.

The question does remain why this specific type of changes have happened several times in Germanic vs. not very often in Finnish (they do already happen in say Estonian, where e.g. 'nail' is nael), but it's a bit of a difference already from claiming that Finnish simply "is conservative", period.

Thinking about it, it's really weird that some languages are more conservative than others, right? Like, really weird.

With biological evolution, conservatism can be explained in terms of settling into an ecological niche that's very stable. Such a niche provides a stable equilibrium: once a relatively optimized design is found, slight genetic deviations will generally make the organism less suited for the niche and will be selected against, thus acting against random mutation to preserve traits for the long haul. But this state of preservation has to be actively maintained by selective pressure. Absent such a stable equilibrium, the weight of random genetic drift would indelibly build up and turn the organism into something else over long periods. At least, I think that's how it works.

But with language change, we don't have any form of selective pressure acting on language structure, as far anyone can tell. There's no force at all acting to maintain an equilibrium. So it would seem that random changes should build up across the board, and linguistic "living fossils" should be impossible. But then you have languages like Finnish, which are notoriously conservative in morphology and phonology. Proto-Germanic *kuningaz was loaned into an earlier stage of Finnish and to this day remains kuningas, whereas it became kung in neighboring Swedish (and, of course, king in English). Everybody just accepts that as a fact of life, but upon close inspection it is really weird.

[ilmaveivi]

The Etymology of Finnish NHL Players a.k.a What Do Their Names Mean?

PACIFIC DIVISION 2023-2024

ANAHEIM DUCKS

URHO VAAKANAINEN

URHO /ˈurho/

A Finnish name derived from a Proto-Finnic word meaning ”man”. A poetic Finnish word meaning ”hero”.

VAAKANAINEN /ˈʋɑːkɑnɑi̯nen/

A Karelian surname based on several Orthodox given names derived from the Greek name Bakchos, meaning ”to shout”. A Finnish homonym for ”scales woman”.

SAN JOSE SHARKS

MIKAEL GRANLUND

MIKAEL /ˈmi.kɑ.el/

Derived from the Hebrew name Mikha’el, meaning ”who is like God?”.

GRANLUND /ˈɡrɑːn.lund/

A topographic Swedish surname meaning ”spruce grove”.

KAAPO KÄHKÖNEN

KAAPO /ˈkɑː.po/

Derived from the Hebrew name Gavri’el, meaning "God is my strong man”.

KÄHKÖNEN /ˈkæh.kø.nen/

A Savonian and Karelian surname possibly derived from the Finnish word käheä, meaning ”hoarse”.

SEATTLE KRAKEN

EELI TOLVANEN

EELI /ˈeː.li/

Derived from the Hebrew name Eli, meaning ”ascension”.

TOLVANEN /ˈtol.ʋɑ.nen/

A Savonian and Karelian surname possibly based on a given name derived from the Old German name Adalwolf, meaning "noble wolf”.

NOTES:

During the 12th century, the tradition of Finnish given names was lost due to the Christianization of Finland under the Swedish rule. By the 16th century only Christian names were accepted, which is why Finnish forms of Christian names are still widely popular in Finland despite the society being fairly secular. The tradition of native Finnish given names wasn’t revived until the 19th century. 

Most Finnish surnames end in suffixes -nen or -la/-lä. The collective suffix -nen, which is more common in Eastern Finnish surnames, indicates belonging to a certain family or clan. The suffix -la/-lä, which is more common in Western Finnish surnames, creates oikonyms from the names of places, farms or small villages.

Karelia and Karelian can be used to refer to a geographical place, language, dialect or people. It is important to note that Karelian is its own language separate from Finnish. However, the Finnish language also has a Karelian dialect that is spoken in the Finnish Karelia. Finnish surnames originating from Karelia have likely been influenced by both Karelian and Finnish.

The IPA forms follow Finnish phonology even with foreign (Swedish, Russian etc.) names in approximation to how an average Finn pronounces them.

The source for most of the given names is Behind The Name. The topographic surnames are direct translations. The explanations for the rest of the surnames are either from Finnish Wiktionary or based on speculation by Finnish genealogy enthusiasts, hence the overuse of the word "possibly".

Feedback is welcome. If you have additions or notice any mistakes, please let me know!

[highlyentropicmind]

Tumblr invents a language, Day 4: Phonology

Summary so far:

Our language will be agglutinative, with free word order and... * sighs * accusative alignment. Today we are choosing the phonology. After this poll is done it may take a while to compile the phonology, so there may not be a poll for a few days

The next few polls will be about features such as grammatical gender, cases, verbal time, aspect and mood, and then I think we can start with vocabulary

Links to previous polls

Day 1: Morphology

Day 2: Primary word order

Day 3: Alignment

[mehilaiselokuva]

SAME ANON HERE: NO PLEASE TELL ME MORE ABOUT PHONETICS IM EVEN MORE CONFUSED NOW I JUST WANT TO UNDERSTAND....

Hello again!

Here's a bit more about Finnish phonetics! This one is beginner friendly hehe

The vowels are /i y u e ø o æ ɑ/ and the consonants are /m n ŋ p t̪ d k s h ʋ l j r/ (If you don't understand this notation, learn the IPA)

However, some phonemes WILL deceive you (for example, /d/ might actually be a [ɾ] in some cases) There is also a glottal stop which for some reason isn't included in the consonant phoneme inventory and also does not have a letter in the alphabet much like [ŋ]. Finnish phonetics are full of allophones that aren't distinguished in writing.

Gemination is another thing that makes Finnish phonetics very irregular (Wikipedia gives hakelava [hɑkelːɑʋɑ] as a great example, where the l is lengthened even though it's not written)

For someone who wants to dive deeper into Finnish phonetics & phonology, I recommend this pdf book

And for someone interested in the field in general, I recommend this term dictionary and this beginners' guide!

[latinthusiast]

anyone just catching up with me: yeah man hows your summer going?

me: oh good you know just the usual (engaging in deep dives into finnish phonology to make myself a powerpoint of all the finnish i’m learning in duolingo but trying to organize the info so i can actually learn the language bc i teach languages (not finnish) and i want to be able to go to finland someday bc i got sucked into eurovision 2023 during a dark time in my life (the end of my first year of full-time teaching) and now my dream is to meet one particular 5′7″ finnish man with a bowl cut)

[tanadrin]

Now that I think about it, for someone who knows English and German learning Swedish would propably be a pretty easy way to becoming Finnish

Uhhhh doesn’t Swedish have like tones and shit? All the North Germanic languages do really weird shit phonologically. And plus then you have to speak Swedish!

[ratscabies]

gotta teach this morning (booooo) then going to a lecture about the history of drag (yayyyy) then going to my gender studies class (boooo) then working with a finnish-speaking friend to elicit linguistic data from her for a phonology project (yayyyy)

then tomorrow I gotta do a grading assessment activity for a few hours (boooo) but I'll get paid and get free lunch (yayyyy) then I gotta go to physical therapy (boooo) but I'll be home for the weekend and able to make some more candles (yayyyyy)

[possessivesuffix]

If you're thinking about the "suprasegmental palatalization" of Skolt / Kildin / Ter Sami, yeah it goes leftward thru arbitrarily many consonants; but it does get realized also on them (yielding also a cross-linguistically rare /nʲ lʲ/ ≠ /ɲ ʎ/ contrast in the process), and is just a floating feature anyway instead of an entire segment, so would not really count as "metathesis" by any measure I think.

FWIW there are theories about locality-of-sound-change that attribute Germanic umlaut in particular and maybe metaphony in general to a similar process too, so that, say, *kukkaz >> *kokk goes thru *kukᵃkᵃaz first of all with an a-colored allophone of /k/ extended leftwards, and only then *u > o / _Cᵃ, but this also doesn't really involve metathesis of anything in there.

I have seen a 189X proposal that pre-Proto-Samic *-äC(C)e-, *-oC(C)e- >> modern Sami varieties' -ieC(C)â-, -uoC(C)â- would start by a way-leftward "metathetic metaphony" to *-êäCCê-, *-êoCCê- (circumflex for close-mid), but that's long since obsolete: lack of lowering and then unconditional *ä > *e > *ē > ie, *o > *ō > uo in stressed syllables works internally just as well and areally better (cf. *ee > ie, *oo > uo in Finnish; in Southern & Pite Sami, *ē > ie, *ō > uo also in unstressed syllables).

(conditioned-by-stress? seems kinda weird to call something "unconditional in X position" actually)

— Northern Finnish has varieties that metathesize *h pretty far leftwards, but all intermediates are on show in other dialects for it to be clear that it's really multiple metatheses all in a row; i.e. something like ⁽*⁾kirvehen (standard Fi kirveen, gen.sg. of kirves 'axe') > kirvhe(e)n > kirhven (phonetically variable, e.g. [kirfʋ̥en], [kirʰfen]). IIRC in most advanced forms in some particular phonological contexts even (equivalent of) > kihrven, but don't quote me on that just yet.

(Also, I'm sure if we left Northern Finnish alone for 500 more years we would find some varieties metathesizing this all the way further to word-initial aspiration.)

Yo linguists, anybody got languages where a segment regularly undergoes metathesis across multiple segments of a given class, or anything basically equivalent to that? A plausible example that comes to mind is like [+high]C₀V -> [+high]C₀ʲV -> [+high]C₀jV, or perhaps jC₀V -> C₀ʲV -> C₀jV, or anything of that general nature. I just need features jumping across substrings of arbitrary lengths. @yeli-renrong @siberian-khatru-72 @possessivesuffix? I vaguely recall something like this from... some Sámi language?

[parma-formenorion]

Thought I’d put down my current thoughts about the language of the Penni.

Fauskanger analyses the word Penni (coming ultimately from Proto-Quendarin *kwendī) as having that same kw > p shift as Sindarin and Telerin, along with a medial nd>nn assimilation. Tolkien further seems to be toying with the idea that the kw > p shift happened before the Sundering.

I’m trying a thing with consonant gradation/alteration. I think it’s only really reasonable to have weak and strong grades, with the strong grade being the original consonant (so like Finnish). This Finnish-ish system might look like:

Nominative singular (basic form): strong form (in this case, nominative singular might be “penda”)

Other cases (after phonological considerations are taken): weak form (ex: penn-)

I don’t think all cases would trigger consonant gradation - it doesn’t in my model languages, so.

⟨nn⟩ could also represent an overlong grade, like North Sámi n’n /nː.n/ so perhaps we could yeet this back into familiar territory for me. This North Sámi-adjacent system would look more like this:

Nominative singular: pen’na /penː.na/(or something)

Strong grade stem: pen’n-

Weak grade stem: penn- (ex: /pen.ni/)

Still would need to reconcile the form “Pendarin” with all of this 🙃

Some assorted other thoughts:

Pendarin is a case language. 7 or 8 feels like a good number. Accusative I think would survive in spoken Pendarin, because of the consonant gradation.

By the late third age, Pendarin has become more of a language family than anything else, because of the long separation between the North and South River Penni - very closely related, with a high degree of mutual intelligibility. In the beginning of the third age, they are dialects.

North River Pendarin has two main dialectal groups, Lórien and Mirkwood. Mirkwood had further divisions, but probably by the 4th age, the only viable one is the Raft Elf/Forest River dialect.

North River Pendarin is heavy with borrowings from Nandorin and Sindarin.

South River Pendarin has a number of dialects, with at least one dialect group situated west of Lefnui, one in Langstrand, and at least one in *waves at Hargondor* somewhere here

North River Pendarin is very seldom used by the 4th age, while South River Pendarin has remained the dominant language in the community.

I had some thoughts on the specific histories of the Pendarin dialects. It’ll come back to me. I hope.