Things they didn't tell me about English, part 2/n

The phonemic inventory. Oh yes, that's a good one. Do you really think the English "th" has something to do with the Finnish "t" or "h"? If so, you're sorely mistaken.

Typically what is meant in written English by "th" is a consonant that simply doesn't exist in Finnish. That goes for many other vowels and consonants in the English language besides that one. As it happens, our languages have divergent "phonological inventories"; we just happen to use different sounds to communicate with each other. Even if we share most of the Latin alphabet in which we write both of our languages, the sounds we assign to them broadly vary..

The total, Finnish inventory is narrower than the English one. To compensate for that Finnish for example retains full contrast between long and short forms of both consonants and vowels, and is phonologically speaking a bit more malleable.

In written Finnish we have the vowels "aeiouyäö". In the spoken one, in IPA, "ɑeiouyæøə". In particular, there is no schwa in there, but simply a fully articulated "ø"/"ö". You'll notice the similarity between IPA and the Finnish alphabet, already. It is no mistake: as a language with a young, Latin derived alphabet at the time of the ratification of the first IPA, the Finnish, much phonetic at that time writing system exerted its due influence.

The consonants are in written, alphabetic order "bcdfghjklmnpqrstvwxz".  When we speak those they translate pretty much straight onto spoken sounds via IPA, after you elide a couple of them: "bdfghjklmnprstv".

To bring it further down into the native Finnish soundset, that translates something as in: "aeiouyäö" and "hjklmnprstv", because certain foreign consonants have to be dropped out as homophones. Also, the one consistent thing not captured by the alphabet is what we call "äng-äänne", as in the velar nasal, denoted variously by "nk" as a short one preceded by "k" and as "ng" as the long, standalone one. In both IPA and saami, it's denoted as "ŋ". Besides that, all kinds of sandhi, diphtongization, palatalization, and whatnot are of course going on at the same time, but are purposely left out of the transcription/orthography.

Be as it may, you will have already noticed how few consonantal phonemes we have in proportion to the wovels. That's part of why Finnish sounds kind of like thin singing to a foreign ear at first sight, and even at the second one, something like "Japanese spoken with an Italian accent". It's because of the unreasonable relative amount of vowels, half of which are then even lenghtened/held; and the relatively soft pronunciation of the narrow inventory of consonants that is left.

English, its phonological inventory is much more difficult, because it can't even be written down using anything approximating a usual Latin alphabet. The Finnish one can, because it was designed to be so, much as Korean Hangul was designed to be a phonetic writing system from the start. English, it's a total mess: you really have to put down two different notations if you want to talk about it. One written, and the other one spoken. So here it goes/hurts...

English vowels. Thanks to a long history of borrowing and endolinguistic mutation/mutilation, you pretty fuckers came up with a ton of them. Half of them I can even pronounce properly, in context. The other half is there, but in pronunciation, I remain insecure:

a (harken), e (zest), ɛ (bed), ɪ (bit), i (seesaw), ɑ (awe), ɒ (oh), o (prom), ʊ (hook), u (prune), æ (plan), ɝ (the r in rotation; it's actually a kind of vowel/consonant hybrid), ʌ (plus in Scottish/Cockney), ə (ehm...)

That's bad enough already. But the consonants are even worse, because of the sheer number and variety of them. They might not require exotic IPA symbols to describe most of them. But the elision-by-homophones which I did above with the Finnish consonants can't really be done here, because all of the consonants actually have minimal pairs. Thus, the canon of them looks like a dog's puke. Which I'm required to regurgitate every day, by the way, as my firm's official language:

b (bad), d (dinghy), g (gun), h (height), j (the y in you; again not quite consonant, not quite vowel), ʤ (jump), k (kill), f (florist), l (linen), m (mine), n (nice), ŋ (trailing ng in mining), p (porous), r (Scottish trilled r as in curd or are), s (sift), ʃ (shot), t (tan), ʧ (chip), θ (thaw), ʒ (zion), ð (the th in father), w (what, another approximant between consonant and vowel), v (via), z (zed, zardoz). Complicating the picture, quite a number of English consonants are aspirated, which carries onto their subjugate vowels even at the root of a word. As in /pin/ versus /pʰin/, which are fully allophonetic in English, with the latter, aspirated version sounding more authentic in most dialects and the first pronunciation often used by naïve Finnish learners of the language.

If you look closely and squint a bit, you'll notice that most of the sounds overlap with the Finnish ones, and with an English dialect or two. We don't, as humans, usually mess around with the sounds we let out too much. Yet a Finnish learner of English, phonogy-wise gets the bitter end of the stick: even in approximation, English simply has a broader inventory of both vowels and consonants.

So let's then do a symmetric difference between the two sets to see what might require extra practice from each side of the language barrier, and at the same time what is already known.

In vowels, Finnish has "ɑeiouyæøə".

English OTOH has "aeɛɪiɑɒoʊuæɝʌə"

This means that English learners of Finnish already know everything but: "yø". That's easy enough.

Vice versa, Finnish learners of English miss: "aɛɪɒʊɝʌ". So it's no wonder many eminent Finnish people fuck up their English vowels, and as a result sound like a hinterland peasant.




So what about the consonants? Let's see...




Basic Finnish has: "bdfghjklmnŋprstv", though we do employ one or others for loan words. What was left out can and are being fully substituted with these ones.

English, it has: "bdghjʤkflmnŋprsʃtʧθʒðwvz". Quite a lot in comparison, as I already said.

So for a Finnish Learner of English, the set of nasty, foreign sounds would now be: "ʤʃʧθʒðwz". Quite a handfull.

For an English learner of Finnish, the corresponding set would be: none whatsoever. This repertoire is already fully covered.

Thus, based on phonology alone, Finnish is actually rather a simple language for an English speaker to learn. At the same time, we do have to learn totally foreign phonemes while being trained in our third-to-second, most important language.

But there is still at least one phoneme which is exceedingly difficult for an English speaker to get, evenas it's an sich present in the English language. That's the trilled "r". You can do it, alright, for example in a word like "rustic", Scottish style. But in Finnish (and Spanish and Portuguese), that trill is much, much deeper, and could be sustained for pretty much as long as your breath carries it.

As in the favourite Finnish curse, "perkele". Obviously you should be able to hold the trill for arbitrary lengths of time when ordering your beer.