Talk:Finnish phonology

message: "However, it is common to hear these clusters eroded in speech ("resitentti") particularly, though not exclusively, by Finns who know little or no Swedish or English and who are not used to making sounds for letters such as d, c or x.
...
The letters b and g do occur in Finnish in loanwords, but more often than not, they are pronounced voiceless, /p/ and /k/ respectively."
Perhaps I should just edit the original article but I'm afraid my English wouldn't be good enough... Nevertheless, I found those two sentences a little strange. In my opinion every Finn (exept for some of those who are more than 70 years old) pronounces the word "presidentti" (and most other consonant clusters) correctly... and in Helsinki region hardly anyone ever replaces b's, d's and g's with voiceless consonants. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 195.10.181.162 (talk • contribs) 12:01, 17 November 2004
:(Well, apparently this unsigned comment has been hanging about here for ages and the article has been revised since, but I'll just make a quick response.)
:Naturally, the typical Finnish pronunciation of presidentti is correct – by Finnish standards. However, even the "proper"  in the Finnish word presidentti is not necessarily the same sound as the  in the English word president. Neither is the  in the Finnish gorilla exactly the same as the  in the English gorilla, or the  in bussi the same as the  in bus. The difference may be difficult to recognize even by an educated Finn. A couple of years ago I learned from my English-phonetics teacher (an English gentleman who has been living in Finland for years) that detailed phonetic studies have found very little if any real difference between words such as bussi and pussi or gorilla and korilla, even when the speakers themselves think their pronunciation of the voiced plosives is proper (by English or some foreign standards). On the other hand, this is nothing to be ashamed about, as it's just a natural way of pronouncing these words in a Finnish context. – Simo Kaupinmäki (talk) 21:49, 9 September 2010 (UTC)
thread_title: Voiced plosives

message: question: 
"soft" D means fricative?  or voiceless?
Thanks. — ishwar  (SPEAK) 22:29, 2005 Mar 22 (UTC)
hi again. any takers on this question?
what does the term soft in soft d refer to?
does it mean:
* fricative?
* voiceless?
* flap/tap?
* palatalized?
thank you – ishwar  (speak) 2005 July 6 15:43 (UTC)
:I don't know where the writer got this term, but it is clear he meant a plosive. See the revised article for a better explanation. Malhonen 12:06, 14 August 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Well, it is rather common in Finnish to refer to b as "pehmeä p" (the soft p), and I think d can similarly be characterized as "pehmeä t" (the soft t). Also, d in the Finnish orthography originally stood for the voiced dental fricative , so I'd guess the writer had just confused two phenomena linked to the same grapheme. – Simo Kaupinmäki (talk) 21:49, 9 September 2010 (UTC)
thread_title: Terminology: "soft D"?

message: Shouldn't the pronunciation of double consonants be covered here?  I don't think it's accurate to just gloss eg. the difference between mato and matto or kisa and kissa as phoneme length; the first has (as far as I understand it) a glottal stop, the second doesn't.
(And no, I don't want to plunge in and do it, because I don't know phonetics well enough to do it right.) Jpatokal 05:42, 11 Feb 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: I've actually very much herd "resitentti" in use. You're right, tho, that "outside the SW area" is superfluous here & should be remoovd. The article Stadin slangi, BTW, does mention s-initial clusters briefly. See also Savo Finnish. --Tropylium (talk) 13:06, 28 January 2008 (UTC)
thread_title: Doubled consonants

message: The article says that the Finnish vowel ä is the Open front unrounded vowel. To me (I'm a native speaker but not a phonetician) that vowel's sound file in the article on that vowel sounds nothing like ä. The Near-open front unrounded vowel however sounds exactly like ä and even the IPA symbol looks much more like the one used in the phonology article. Has there prehaps been some kind of a mistake? Ossi 22:28, 21 March 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Open front unrounded or near-open front unrounded? 

message: I removed this from the article:
:Some phoneticians have also raised the question, whether it would be more appropriate to mark the open front vowel as  instead of . This would make the Finnish phonological system seem more symmetric, since IPA  is strictly speaking a little higher than the open front vowel . Some acoustic studies seem to indicate that there is in fact no significant difference between the orthographical a and ä in terms of vowel closeness.
The perceived quality of /ä/ is [æ], and vice versa. I and the writer above can confirm this as native speakers. Trying to make /ä/ an [a] because it's more symmetric is prescribing, not describing. Real languages don't need to have perfectly symmetric vowel systems, and Finnish is a real language. --Vuo 22:09, 26 March 2006 (UTC)
replies: text:  Just thought I might throw in that you are absolutely correct, and I can confirm this.  On the other hand in the sense of speech-production the finnish /ä/ sometimes bleeds into what would be described as [a] (as opposed to [ɑ]).  This is perhaps what the previous writer was getting at, on the other hand this does not reflect the situation in 'Standard Finnish', which is, to my understanding, what is being talked about here. ;)  --Ryan 11:17, 18 April 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Well, when I listen to Helsinki area people, women in particular, I often hear a slightly nasal sound [a] for the phoneme /ɑ/. So, /sɑlille/ may be realized as [salille]. But I Am Not A Phonetician, so I'll leave the article alone. --Vuo 23:32, 18 April 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: On the other hand, many people from the Helsinki area, such as myself (didn't realise it until it was pointed out to me), do the exact opposite: they pronounce /ä/ as [a]. I think what you are describing is not a linguistic trait of the Helsinki area but a recent phenomenon of trying to sound 'posh', found in many Finnish localities. --Oghmoir 09:46, 26 August 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: If it involves language, it's linguistic. People trying to sound 'posh' is definately a sociolinguistic thing, too.  ;)  Anyway [a] isn't necessarily more nasal than /ɑ/ unless you all mean something like [ã] (though Finnish wouldn't have things that nasalized).  In Helsinki I noticed the sort of change in quality of the vowel represented by 'ä' to be not so much [æ], as [a].  Nasalization indeed does occur (at least in Helsinki Finnish) in nasalizing environments, although not all changes with these vowels are going to mean that nasalization is involved.  If you do hear some sort of nasalization in non-nasalizing environments, please do mention it. --Ryan 17:46, 26 August 2006 (UTC)
replies: text:  Ryan, you're right. I wasn't saying what Vuo was talking about isn't linguistic, I was expressing my doubts about whether it is characteristic to the Helsinki area. :) And yes, slight nasalisation is quite common in the environment of nasal consonants, but also, nasalisation can be heard in non-nasalising environments, too, in the speech of the aforementioned people, especially girls (I see myself as neutral in gender issues, that is a neutral observation!), sometimes to annoying degrees. That is part of the stereotype about those types, but it is based on reality, I can verify that, hehe. --Oghmoir 18:00, 26 August 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Artificial symmetry? 

message: It's definitely an open-mid back unrounded vowel.. try for yourself. The IPA [o] sounds more like "ooh" than the "real" O to me.. I'm not even going to argue, I speak Russian as my native tongue: there the O is realized as a close-mid back rounded vowel (IPA: [O]). In layman terms, comparing Russian vowels to Finnish vowels, Finns pronounce it more deeply, lower voiced, in the back, whereas Russian pronoun it more in the front. Seriously. Also, I'm not really sure about the e, either. Sounds more like an open-mid front unrounded vowel. --84.249.253.201 00:21, 23 December 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I'm a nativ speaker and I agree with these observations, at least as far as my own idiolect goes. Close-mid  is a sound I don't think Finnish uses at all; proper mid  is common, but so is open-mid , especially in the /uo/ difthong and in the speech of peeps like me who have a fronted /ɑ/. This results in a slightly raised /e/ too, however; but for those with a backed /æ/ insted, I think this might be reversed. --Tropylium 17:05, 9 June 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finnische_Sprache#Phonologie - The German Wikipedia seems much more accurate to me, and even ö doesn't sound like the IPA [ö] exactly (when I heard some German, the ö the person pronounced sounded more like [y] to me, but it's the [ö] ö, not the [œ] ö I thought was the "real" one as a Finn". The Finnish phonology involves a more open mouth (less rounded) from what I can tell. Since OR is not allowed, I suggest using the German article's sources on phonology. :) --nlitement [talk] 02:09, 28 June 2007 (UTC)
replies: text:  I wouldn't use any of them, neither the English nor the German. Instead I would do the same as Suomi, Toivanen and Ylitalo in Finnish Sound Structure,* p. 21, where they treat the Finnish mid vowels as being between [ɛ], [œ] and [ɔ] used in the German Wikipedia and [e], [ø] and [o] used here in the English Wikipedia, respectively, thus [e̞], [ø̞] and [o̞]. It is also worth noting that [ɑ] has the same height as [æ], thus [ɑ̝]. I'm not a native speaker, but I have grown up in various Finnish environments, and [e̞], [ø̞], [o̞] and [ɑ̝] are definitely how I would pronounce the vowels. -- Llonydd (talk) 08:52, 31 December 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  O 

message: Isn't the Finnish L sound more like , unless the previous and next vowel are both front vowels?
E.g. halla , helle . --85.156.230.132 (talk) 10:32, 17 June 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: "More like", possibly in some contexts, but that doesn't necessarily imply that it should be transcribed (or, is actually transcribed by anyone) as such. To my ears it's much less velarized than in languages where the contrast is phonemic, or even in ones like English, if at all. This seems like one of those way minor phonetic variations that "nobody cares about"; things like  -  and from there on down. But hey, maybe you can find some paper that describes this variation too. --Tropylium (talk) 11:52, 17 June 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: The wrong quality of L reveals the foreignness of the speaker. --85.156.228.123 (talk) 19:50, 17 June 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: It's NOT velarized (and I'm saying this with Russian and Finnish being both my native languages), but the halla/helle difference does exist. The L in halla is closer to being a retroflex lateral approximant, while in helle it's alveolar. This is one of those things that phonologists fail to note and if you tried to speak Finnish exactly according to the IPA table in this article, you'd sound rather foreign. The German Wiki article of this is better. --nlitement [talk] 23:43, 14 February 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: I agree with the OP, /l/ is definitely velarised when in proximity to "back" vowels and pronounced without velarisation when around "front" or "neutral" vowels. I actually came here to write that but found that someone already did. 122.148.127.225 (talk) 23:08, 13 October 2014 (UTC)
thread_title:  The L sound 

message: What about the participle tehtykään /tehtykkään/? --Vuo (talk) 12:52, 2 August 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: Smacks of the dialectal gemination processes a la "ossaa vallaa tinnaa", but don't quote me on that. --Trɔpʏliʊm • blah 07:30, 8 August 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Geminates 

message: Aside from one very minor and peripheral point, the whole article is unsourced. It reads as calm, reasoned and informed; but the native or near-native intuitions of a variety of phonologically informed and well intentioned editors aren't enough. Where can one find verification for all (or much) of this? -- Hoary (talk) 00:10, 12 July 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: I've added a mention of and link to Suomi, et al., Finnish sound structure. NB my description of it as "further reading" is deliberate; it's not a reference, as I have not checked the content of the article against it. -- Hoary (talk) 23:35, 13 July 2009 (UTC)
thread_title: Why should readers believe any of this?

message: Okay, so "t → d (lato - ladot)" is a change caused by gradation, which happens when "If the onset of the last syllable is a plosive, it is subject to consonant gradation" Okay, that's fine... except the onset of the last syllable in "lato" is a plosive, yes? 75.180.45.139 (talk) 02:00, 18 May 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: Good catch. Someone seems to have been confused about the conditioning: syllable closure is the general condition, and exceptions like pue! result from secondary loss of syllable-final consonants (*pukek > *puɣek > *puɣe > pue) --Trɔpʏliʊm • blah 16:08, 19 May 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  Gradation 

message: "Thus, if secondary stress would normally fall on a light (CV.) syllable but this is followed by a heavy syllable (CVV. or CVC.), the secondary stress moves one syllable further ("to the right") and the preceding foot (syllable group) therefore contains three syllables."
In most current foot-based theory, feet can only contain 1 or 2 syllables; the second unstressed syllable would be unfooted. Generalizing away from feet, we could just say that there would be a lapse (two adjacent unstressed syllables). There currently isn't a source for any of the secondary stress analysis so I dunno how to edit the section without original research. Thoughts? P~M (Talk) 00:04, 18 December 2017 (UTC)
thread_title:  Stress? 

message: Perhaps aika can indeed be described by /ɑj/ as on Help:IPA/Estonian and Finnish, but then we need a second example with /ɑi/ such as airo, where /ɑj/ is at least confusing or should at least have the added explantion when it is pronounced [ɑi], i.e. where [ɑj] would be wrong. See also https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/airo --Espoo (talk) 08:51, 17 June 2018 (UTC)
thread_title:  ɑj/ɑi 

message: They are related and need a better connection as well as sources. --Per W (talk) 19:55, 12 December 2018 (UTC)
thread_title:  Glottal  stop and gemination 

message: I don't know how to fix it, but the image at the top of this page on the mobile app is the Israeli flag, not the Finnish flag. 83.250.74.158 (talk) 12:21, 15 September 2023 (UTC)
replies: text: It's vandalism, it'll be fixed once the cache expires. Nardog (talk) 18:55, 15 September 2023 (UTC)
replies: text: @Nardog Thank you! 83.250.74.158 (talk) 16:42, 16 September 2023 (UTC)
thread_title:  Flag