Re: A Finnish descendant

Philip Newton wrote:
> On Mon, 19 Jul 2004 10:04:31 -0400, Trebor Jung <treborjung@...> wrote:
>
>>Anyone have suggestions of how I could mutate Finnish into something new?
>>Reducing diphthongs is IMHO a good starting point, but I'm not r'ly sure
>>what those diphthongs could turn into...
>
>
> One thing off the top of my head is yö -> ö, and uo -> ö as well for
> good measure. Who needs pesky vowel harmony anyway. Then ei -> e: ->
> e, and äi -> ä: -> ä -> a.
I think more realism on the uo -> ö front could be obtained if we send
u/uu forward (having ridded ourselves of pesky sounds like y by
unrounding them), then simplify uo into uu.

I'm not sure which, if any, of these diphthongs are actually in Finnish,
but my proposal is:

Finnish		Afterfinnish
Suomi		Suumi

i		i
y		i
e		e
ö		e
ä		e and a at random
ii		ee < ei < @i
yy		ee < ei < @i < ii
ee		ii
öö		ee
ää		a
u		y
o		u
a		o
uu		yy
oo		uu
aa		oo

ie		ii
ei		ee
yö		yy
äi		ee

ai		aa

uo		uu
au		oo
ou		uu
(The obvious pattern with the diphthongs is that the simplify on the
first element. The obvious pattern with backstuff is rounding and
rotating on (w/redundant rounding, à la Svenska). The obvious pattern
with front long unrounded vowels is moving up, except where such an
action is prohibited by insufficient space in the mouth, when
diphthongisation ensues.)

For best results, you may need to add a little /a/ and stir, most
languages have some sort of low unrounded vowel but I seem to have
gravitated away  from them. (Colonial Englishes gravitated away too, but
American invented one from a perfectly decent /Q/, whereas Australian
English transformed the unspeakably horrid and silly /V/ into one.
English from England I think started to gravitate away, but more
recently has apparently decided that [&] really isn't that great a
sound, anyway.)

Speakers of Afterfinnish will obviously be stereotyped by speakers of
Finnish as pronouncing all vowels as essentially /e/, with good reason.
Speakers of Afterfinnish will no doubt stereotype speakers of Finnish as
having lax jaws, what with all those diphthongs.


--
| Tristan.               |       To be nobody-but-yourself in a world
| kesuari@yahoo!.com.au  |  which is doing its best to, night and day,
|                        |                 to make you everybody else---
|                        |          means to fight the hardest battle
|                        |            which any human being can fight;
|                        |                    and never stop fighting.
|                        |      --- E. E. Cummings, "A Miscellany"
|                        |
|                        |     In the fight between you and the world,
|                        |                             back the world.
|                        |      --- Franz Kafka,
|                        |         "RS's 1974 Expectation of Days"