I found an interesting little example about foreign loan words in Finnish in New Perspectives in Historical Linguistics, Paul Kiparsky, in The Routledge Handbook of Historical Linguistics, edited by Claire Bowern and Bethwyn Evans (2014). The example is on foreign words containing /f/.
I summarise below what Kiparsky says about 2 strategies for dealing with non-native sequences of sounds: insertion (‘epenthesis’) and deletion. After that, I cover how Finnish deals with /f/ in foreign loan words.
Many other things in Kiparsky’s chapter are interesting, but they are beyond the scope of this post.
Foreign sounds in loan words borrowed from other languages
Kiparsky points out that:
- in adopting loanwords, there is a trade-off between two aims. One aim is staying close to the donor language’s phonetics. The other aim is integrating the sounds into the recipient language’s morphology and phonology.
- some sequences of sounds in a word in the donor language would breach a sequencing (phonotactic) constraint in the recipient language. If so, the preferred solution is usually to insert another sound (‘epenthesis’)—for example inserting a vowel to break up a cluster of consonants. If inserting another sound is impossible, one of the borrowed sounds will be deleted instead.
Example
Kiparsky illustrates those points (on epenthesis and deletion) with an example of a Swedish word skruv /skrʉv/ borrowed into Finnish, becoming ruuvi:
- Finnish does not normally tolerate final consonants (other than the coronals /t, s, n, r, l/). So, /-i/ is added to the final /-v/, forming /-vi/.
In the earliest borrowings into literary Finnish, final consonants were retained, either with no vowel following or with any of a range of vowels. Later on, final consonants were retained only with the vowel /i/ following, as in Japani or tunneli—or, indeed, ruuvi.
Why do Finnish speakers prefer not to end borrowed words with a final consonant? Kiparsky suggests a reason: declensional patterns for native Finnish words ending in a consonant are much more complex than the patterns for wordings in -i. - Finnish tends not to tolerate initial consonant clusters.
Can epenthesis fix that problem? Inserting in the Swedish cluster /skr/ a vowel (say, /e/), to give /*sekrúuvi/ or /*eskrúuvi/ would breach the (separate) Finnish requirement for stress to be on the 1st syllable. Also, inserting a vowel, and moving the stress—to give /*sékruuvi/ or /*éskeruuvi/—would produce a form whose sounds moves too far from the Swedish original.That would conflict with the aim of staying close to the phonetics of Swedish.
Because epenthesis can’t fix the problem, Finnish instead deletes /sk-/, producing /ruuvi/.
Examples in this post are all from Swedish. They use standard Swedish spelling, but add marking for vowel length (with the symbol ː) and mark where the stress falls if it doesn’t fall on the 1st syllable.
Finnish counterparts of /f/ in loanwords
The consonant /f/ does not appear in native Finnish words, though native words can contain the voiced equivalent /v/.
When Finnish borrows a foreign word containing /f/, it uses 3 different approaches in different contexts:
- use /hv/between vowels within the same foot:
kaffe → kahvi (‘coffee’); biff → pihvi (‘steak’); soffa → sohva (‘sofa’); giráff → kirahvi (‘giraffe’)
(a foot is a sequence of usually 1 or 2 syllables, typically containing only one stressed syllable.) - use /h/ before a consonant:
saffran → sahrami (‘saffron’); saft → sahti (‘table beer’) - use /v/ elsewhere—(1) word and foot initially:
fiskáːl → viskaali (‘prosecutor’); färg → väri (‘colour’); unifórm → únivòrmu (‘uniform’) ; ingefäːra → ínkivääri (‘ginger’)
(2) after a consonant:
konfékt → konvehti (‘candy); asphalt → asvaltti (‘asphalt’)
A more compact and clearer rule
Kiparksy points out how to express the above list of 3 rules more compactly and more insightfully: Finnish replaces foreign /f/ with the sequence /hv/. That sequence unpacks the features of /f/ into the two adjacent sounds, which do both appear separately in native Finnish words.
Then, the following normal phonotactic constraints of Finnish operate on /hv/:
- there are no tautosyllabic clusters—no clusters of more than one consonant within a syllable. So /hv/ can occur only if /-h/ ends one syllable and /v-/ starts the next syllable, with no consonant following /v-/ immediately.
- /-h/ cannot appear at the end of a foot.
- Any unsyllabified consonant is dropped.
So:
/v/ cannot appear before a consonant, as that would make a cluster: sahrami (not sah.vrami); sahti (not sah.vti)
/h/ cannot appear:
(1a) at the start of a word: viskaali (not h.viskaali); väri (not h.väri)
(1b) at the end of a foot: univormu, not unih.vormu; ínkivääri (not ínkih.vääri)
(2) after a consonant: konvehti (not konh.vehti); asvaltti (not ash.valtti);
Suomi, Juhani Toivanen and Riikka Ylitalo note in their book Finnish Sound Structure. Phonetics, phonology, phonotactics and prosody (2008) that /f/ (rather than /v/ or /h/) does appear in some fairly recent loanwords, eg filmi, fakta, fasismi, elefantti, Afrikka.