... means "the preparation for a wedding night", and has an obvious division between ö and a because of vowel harmony. But what about hääyö?

You can't have four vowels in a row. Ouoilla is only attested thirteen times in Google, and most of those are from the Kalevala.

You're supposed not to be allowed three vowels in a row, hence partitives like autoja and lusikoja, explains Daniel Abondolo in the excellent Colloquial Finnish. I don't know how this squares with aie, which finishes with an unwritten glottal stop, though it seems to mostly appear in the plural forms aikeita, aikeissa and aikeista.

Häät is an interesting word. That it comes from the German Hochzeit shows that Finnish is not quite the Jurassic Park amber you assume from seeing words like kaupunki, sinappi and kuningas.

posted at: 22:04 | path: /baltism/greedy | permanent link to this entry