... 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

Is greedy parsing always the correct strategy when reading Finnish words?

The question first occurred to me in June 2002 on the Suomenlinna ferry: First, is there any point in, when presented with an unfamiliar and very long word, looking up elements that aren't the first first? Second, is the largest chunk at the beginning of a word that could form a word, assuming that the rest of the word can form a word or unit of sense, always a word?

Take tulipaloale, to pick a word at random from my Gummerus. Ignoring the biggest word that is the word itself, the next break is tulipaloa|le, but le, unlike la (as in Tapiola, Pohjola, Kalevala) doesn't make sense on its own. The next break, working back, is tulipalo|ale, which, ale meaning "sale" and being short for alennusmyyntiö, makes a word. The rest of the word breaks into tulipa|lo, again, not allowed, or tuli|palo, which means fire-fire. So, a fire-fire sale.

Pont Lurcock points out that there is a problem with the letter n, which is the genitive marker. Both aula (entrance hall) and naula (nail) (Pont's example) are words, as are ero (difference) and nero (genius). I'm used to ambiguity in English, but Finnish seems such a well-constructed language that the ambiguities are something of a surprise. I've never heard of anyone being brought a plate of liver in a restaurant (Haluaisin maksaa) when they wanted to pay, though.

posted at: 20:47 | path: /baltism/greedy | permanent link to this entry