Re: To What Extent is Standard Finnish a Conlang?

> > /d ts/ used
> >to be /D T:/ and had dialectally decayed to a variety of forms, /r ht/
>for
> >instance. The current pronounciation is essentially imported from German,
> >after the 17th century spellings <d tz>. (BTW ... I have [4] for /d/,
>which
> >leads to all four of [4] [4r] [r:] [r] being distinct, a little like the
> >Dutch [X]<>[XR]<>[R] contrast mentioned recently. Can't think of a
>minimal
> >quartet right now.)
>
>Ah, so /T/ was a phoneme in Old Finnish?
Yes, itself from Proto-Fennic /ts)/.


>I imagine that [4r] = <dr>?  So it must only exist in loanwords.
True.


> >There's, however, so much complicated and unexpected derivation in the
> >field of "civilization words" that Standard Finnish would definitely
>count
> >as a mildly a posteriori conlang. [examples snup]
>
>That's very interesting!  It's always neat to see how written language
>influences the evolution of words.
>
>How about changes in grammar?  From what I've read, Old Finnish had the
>ending -p(i) for verbs in the 3rd-person singular.  What happened to it,
>and where did the modern ending (simply lengthening the stem vowel) come
>from?
All instances of -pi I know of also have lengthening of the previous vowel,
so the ending apparently was just dropped. I don't know the history further
here.


>Also, I've read that the genitive plural ending -iden is wholly
>artificial; some dialects had -jen and others -den, and the coiners of the
>standardized language simply combined them together.  How true is this?
-iden is the expected standardized result of Old Finnish -iDen. The standard
language, however, mostly uses -jen. -iden is allowed only with stems ending
in a long vowel or a native -e, and occasionally with those ending in a
consonant.
There's also a number of other genitive plural endings - at its worst, a
single word may have half a dozen equally valid forms, and almost all have
at least two (traces of the old dual there, I think)


> >>Also, does spoken Finnish (where it differs from the standard language)
> >>more accurately reflect the true evolution of the language?
> >
> >What exatly do you mean by "the true evolution"? Standard spoken Finnish
> >has naturally been influenced by the written language, while the dialects
> >have evolved to a kajillion different directions...
>
>I meant that the standardized language may have some grammatical features
>that do not have an etymology in any one dialect -- they're somehow
>compromises (combinations, conflations, etc.) between forms in two or more
>different dialects.
>
>Thanks for your help so far. :)
>
>- Rob
I can think of one... old Finnish widely did not distinguish between
adjectives and nouns.* The modern distinction between the adjectival suffix
-inen and the diminutival -nen is, as I understand it, wholly artificial.
Even today, in informal speech pretty much nobody pronounces the /i/ in the
former (unless the root is monosyllabic and vowel-final, in which case both
forms have it.)

There are also tendencies to shy away from syntactical rules that also exist
in Swedish, but only grammar nazis really follow those.

John Vertical
*Technically, this distinction doesn't exist even in the modern language,
but that's just because we call nouns "substantives" and all three of nouns,
adjectives and pronouns "nouns".

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