Wednesday, July 15, 2020

Word-Final Consonants in Estonian and Finnish

Finnish words can only end in five consonants. They are /l/, /n/, /r/, /s/ and /t/. Loanwords are an exception to this rule. The following Finnish words end with consonants: avain (key), olut (beer), sammal (moss), taivas (sky) and tytär (daughter).

Estonian, a related language, not only allows more word-final consonants but also allows word-final long consonants such as in the word kell (clock), which is kello in Finnish.  Here are ten words to illustrate:

jalg jalka (leg)
järv järvi (lake)
kakskümmend kaksikymmentä (twenty)
kirik kirkko (church)
leib leipä (bread)
lehm lehmä (cow)
lind lintu (bird)
päev päiva (day)
silm silmä (eye)
võid voi (butter)

The examples illustrate that Estonian allows more word-final consonants than Finnish. In the pairs järv/järvi and silm/silmä the Estonian words are the result of apocope. Finnish retains the word-final consonant in these words and is thus more conservative.


No comments:

Featured Post

Finding the Proto-Form

Related languages have a number of words which are similar to one another. In the branch of linguistics known as historical linguistics, the...