#consonant gradation

[finnishfun]

Consonant gradation is hard

(insp.)

[possessivesuffix]

I have been organizing my couple of gigabytes of pdfs again, and, I have developed a probably unpopular opinion: if you are a researcher and are having trouble getting citations, it’s probably because you’re not contributing anything useful

This brought to you by reading yet another completely useless generative analysis of Finnish consonant gradation that would transparently fail as soon as applied to even slightly divergent dialects of Finnish, let alone things like Karelian or Votic. Plus also with flagrant flouting of Occam’s Razor as usual: the variation in the gradation of hk (rahka : rahkan ‘quark’ versus nahka : nahan ‘leather’) is written off in one line as lexicalized, while nongradating words like muki : mukin ‘mug’ are written instead off as “loanword phonology” — nevermind that this is obviously nativized since it doesn’t retain g. But of course, if we skipped over the excuse of “loanword phonology”, the natural conclusion would be that just like rahka : rahkan is regular and nahka : nahan has to be lexicalized — then also muki : mukin is regular and joki : joen ‘river’ is lexicalized! (This will be poor news for the author’s thesis though, which proceeds from the provocative assumption that medial lenition would be default and it is instead strong grades that are derived by gradation… a possible angle historically I’m sure, but pretty clearly nonsense synchronically.)

[thisisfinnish]

You once said, "Finnish grammar is a rather complicated mess of rules and full of things that don’t follow the rule but go their own way." and I actually heard that despite many rules, the Finnish grammar doesn't have many exceptions to them? Was that a lie?

Hi!

I do not like to call anyone a liar, but Finnish, even with several rules for different uses, is actually pretty bendy.

The best example is consonant gradation. There is the basic rule that works most of the time, but then, there can also be reversed gradation, in which the words change to the other direction: normal consonant gradation, the nominative case has the strong state: sulka - sulanreverse consonant gradation, the nominative has the weak state: varis - variksen

Then, sometimes a consonant takes part in consonant gradtion even though it should not, by rule: mies - miehen, not mies - miesen (which it would be, according to the rule). Normally s is not part of consonant gradation, the phenomenon usually touches k, t and p. And this is not the end of the matter - I have two pages of notes about exceptions in consonant gradation from my morphology class - I could go on for a while about this, but maybe better keep it short.

Second example is conjugation. Depending on how many exceptions to the rule you wish to suffer, you can create different “classes” of conjugating nouns from just 5 (if I remember correctly) up to 21. (”classes” here meaning forming groups of words that conjugate in a similar manner). So, yeah. There is a lot of variety, and all of it does not go by the rules set to the others.

This also applies to verbs on different levels. I’ll explain the first one that came to mind. There are verbs that have all possible conjugation forms, and verbs that have lost some of the possible conjugation - maybe the use is so rare that the unused forms have disappeared, maybe it’s about semantic stuff. Good example of this is the verb kirkua, which was discussed also on this blog a little while back. Finnish people don’t know how to conjugate it fully. The right form sounds weird, because it’s not in frequent use. It really well could be, because kiljua, which has roughly the same meaning (to scream), has all its forms used and known by everyone.

These here are just a couple of morphological arguments for the exceptions and not rule-following words, but this is what first came to mind and was easy enough to confirm from my notes. On the syntax side there is a lot more (Finnish syntax is pretty complex and there are no right answers most of the time. I almost lost my mind on the syntax course, to be honest). If you are interested in the syntactic side of things, just let me know, and I’ll see what I can dig up.