Vowel harmony in compound words??

[tuomasxtarja]

Hey all,

I'm still pretty new to Finnish but I thought vowel harmony applied to all words - even compound words. Why is it ok to have iltapäivä??

[Jukka Aho]

I'm still pretty new to Finnish but I thought vowel harmony applied to all words - even compound words.

Compound words are exempt from that rule.

The fundamental parts still retain their internal vowel harmony, though. The last part of the compound dictates the vowel used in the case endings, etc.

Why is it ok to have iltapäivä?? :?

Maybe simply because (simple, non-compound) words operate as units, and when they’re joined together to form compounds, the original parts are still functioning as sub-units within that longer word.

You get a secondary stress on the first syllables of the parts of a compound, for instance, and even if you’re hyphenating compounds, it is recommended to split them at the boundary where the individual parts meet rather than at some arbitrary syllable. So constructing a compound does not make the internal “unit-ness” of the parts go away.

Also, words with front and back vowels can be freely mixed in a sentence and appear next to each other, so that in itself does not pose a problem for a native speaker. The only difference between the pronunciation of iltapäivä and the two consecutive words ilta, päivä is (probably?) a subtle difference in stress.

It is only when you try to cram both front and back vowels within a single non-compound word (an indivisible “unit”) when a native speaker begins to feel there’s something off with that word. Olympialaiset (“The Olympics”, “The Olympic Games”) is a well-known example of a word which some native speakers of Finnish would rather pronounce as olump(p)ialaiset — maybe comparable to how some non-native speakers find words such as yöpöytä difficult to pronounce. Then again, even this difficulty with words like olympialaiset is often exaggerated: in this day and age, most Finns know a foreign language or two and have been exposed to all kinds of foreign words and names which have “violated” their Finnish sense of vowel harmony uncountable times since childhood, so it’s not all that big a deal some sources make it out to be. But still, if a new word is invented or adopted in the language, it will very likely be adapted to fit this vowel harmony scheme. (Olympialaiset is an exception primarily because “Olympia” is a proper name of a place in Greece, and the word used for referring to the sports event derives from that name. And the Greek probably pronounce it in another way altogether, but we-the-Finns are so accustomed to our near-phonetic spelling that even foreign words and names often get pronounced “according to their spelling” — as if they were Finnish words — and not how they actually pronounce them in the language of origin.)

From a purely practical viewpoint, it would be difficult to form compounds in the first place if there was a rule you couldn’t mix and match words featuring front vowels with words featuring back vowels and if you always had to dance around the issue somehow instead of using the most obvious words...

[Sami-Is-Boss]

we-the-Finns are so accustomed to our near-phonetic spelling that even foreign words and names often get pronounced “according to their spelling” — as if they were Finnish words — and not how they actually pronounce them in the language of origin.

I do enjoy hearing Finns and various other nationalities making pig's ears of the station names on the Tube

[Rosamunda]

...a few come to mind: Leicester Square; Knightsbridge; Bayswater; Canary Wharf; Marylebone; Southwark; Bakerloo; Ruislip

But then again, a lot of American tourists struggle with some of those too...!

[mrjimsfc]

As a shooting enthusiast it drives me crazy to hear all these "knowledgeable" shooters talk about lahPOOah ammunition and Sayko (sounds like a Japanese watch) rifles.