Abstract
The purpose of this paper1 is to compare some aspects of the quantity systems of two related languages, Finnish and Estonian. Finnish and Estonian belong to the Balto-Finnic branch of the Finno-Ugric language family. They have almost identical segmental phoneme inventories. Superficially it also seems that they have very similar word structures. Often Finnish and Estonian words can be matched morpheme for morpheme or even phoneme for phoneme. Both languages have fixed primary stress on the first syllable of a word.2 In principle, both are quantity languages: oppositions between short and long phonemes permeate the phonological structure of both. Upon closer scrutiny, however, the quantity systems of the two languages show farreaching differences. Finnish has two degrees of quantity.3 Every vowel is either long or short. Diphthongs count as equivalent to long vowels. Short and long vowels contrast in any syllable of a word; there are no positional restrictions, either with regard to place within the word or with regard to stress. The opposition between short and long consonants can be realized only in intervocalic position; there are no consonantal quantity contrasts in word-initial and word-final position. Long consonants in intervocalic position contain a syllable boundary and are distributed between the two syllables so that the first part of the consonant closes the preceding syllable and the second part starts the following syllable. Consonant clusters function, in general, in a similar manner.4 No clusters occur in wordinitial or word-final position, the positions where consonant quantity is noncontrastive. There are numerous segmental restrictions which eliminate some segmental sequences and influence the relative frequency of other combinations. The
Published Version
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call