Stupid {expletive-deleted} consonant gradation

[Bavarian]

I was pretty certain what the headline meant, but trying to remember the infinitive of the verb to make certain caused a few problems....

There's another random K popping up in the article, when "farmarihousut" got shortened to "farkut". Sometimes I think the Finns came up with these disappearing/reappearing K's just to piss off learners of the language.

[Rosamunda]

Farkut is just farkut. It is soooo much easier to learn the word "lexically" rather than faff around trying to find some existential pseudo-grammatical reason for it having a K in it.

Some of those FFL teachers go a bit too far with the grammar.

[EP]

Ammuskelija comes from verb ammuskella.

Then there is ampuja that comes from verb ampua.

The difference between ammuskella and ampua. Ampua is to shoot, ammuskella means the same but it is more random, somebody just shoots around here and there and everywhere.

[Rob A.]

I was pretty certain what the headline meant, but trying to remember the infinitive of the verb to make certain caused a few problems....

There's another random K popping up in the article, when "farmarihousut" got shortened to "farkut". Sometimes I think the Finns came up with these disappearing/reappearing K's just to piss off learners of the language.

I wouldn't be so hard on yourself. ...

Paeta/pakenee is a good example of reverse (indirect) consonant gradation....Reverse gradation is tough anyway, and when it involves the letter, "k", ....well...what can I say... The way I deal with it is to look at the stem part of a word and then I think ....'Does this stem have a particularly "weak/wimpy" kind of look to it?' ...and if I think it does, then I start to think about the letter, "k"...

And penelope's advice is good when it comes to the more complicated aspects of consonant gradation....probably better, at least in the short run, to "pick-up" these kinds of words lexically.

And thanks for posting this, it lead me to this rather interesting link:

http://dspace.library.uvic.ca:8080/bits ... intula.pdf

So far I've read a few bits of it, but I'll try to go through all of it. It's a Master's thesis dealing with language acquistion by the descendants of Finnish immigrants, where English has become the dominant "adult" language, and Finnish was the "childhood" language. The subjects of this study were descendants of immigrants to the Finnish colony at Sointula in British Columbia. In her thesis, she also discusses the acquisition of consonant gradation by native speakers in Finland.... And, not surprisingly, experimentation is essentially how it is learned...you know, figuring out what works and what doesn't....

Also, among the descendants of immigrants, consonant gradation is "lost" in the reverse of this learning process...the hardest parts, i.e., one letter changing to another are "lost", i.e. "p" to "v", before consonant gradation involving two letters changing to one...ie "kk" to "k"....

[kalmisto]

I was pretty certain what the headline meant, but trying to remember the infinitive of the verb to make certain caused a few problems...

A morphological analyzer of Finnish can tell you the infinitive of "pakenee" . See this ! :
http://www2.lingsoft.fi/cgi-bin/fintwol?word=pakenee

[tuulen]

...It is soooo much easier to learn the word "lexically" rather than faff around trying to find some existential pseudo-grammatical reason for it having a K in it.

Some of those FFL teachers go a bit too far with the grammar.

I simply must agree with you about the Finnish letter k. I usually refer to the rules of grammar, but the letter k is an exception. Yes, it does have its rules, but I have been unexpectedly surprised by the letter k so often that I have found it easier and more reliable to simply learn which words could include a vanishing k, than to attempt to keep track of a seemingly inexhaustible number of grammatical rules about it.

It has come to a point where if I do not understand a Finnish word then the first thing I do is to look for a missing k.

[Bavarian]

Ammuskelija comes from verb ammuskella.

Then there is ampuja that comes from verb ampua.

The difference between ammuskella and ampua. Ampua is to shoot, ammuskella means the same but it is more random, somebody just shoots around here and there and everywhere.

The grammatical term for it is Frequentative, something I learned when I was confused by a winter headline reading something like "Helsingissä bussit myöhästelevät koko päivä(ä)" (I can't remember if that should be in the partitive or not). I knew the verb "myöhästyä", but the form didn't look quite right.

As for "farkut", I find the etymology interesting: farmari was presumably taken from English (at least, since jeans came from America, it probably makes sense to use an American word for "farmer" rather than some Finnish compound); housut presumably from the German Hosen. A look at the Wikipedia page on jeans gives links to the same information in a whole bunch of languages, and it's interesting how many of them are "jeans" as in English, or a phonetic equivalent that fits the grammar of the language. If Finnis are going to borrow a word like "farmari", you'd think they'd borrow "jeans" too, even though it doesn't fit into Finnish pronunciation.

The bit about the K creeping in was a bit of a joke.

[sammy]

If Finnis are going to borrow a word like "farmari", you'd think they'd borrow "jeans" too, even though it doesn't fit into Finnish pronunciation.

I don't think this has happened, with the word "jeans" I mean... it can well be a question of pronunciation, although one could imagine we might have come up with "tsiinssit" or something to that effect, at least in spoken language (the somewhat equivalent tsäänssi for example is used widely.... jokainen tsäänssi on mahdollisuus...). Maybe it's because we already have a Jean S

But "jamekset" I think became almost a generic word for jeans many moons ago, in the late 60's / early 70's. It was derived from a brand of jeans called "James". The brand (and the word) fell out of fashion when "international" brands became more easily available. That's the way it goes.

As for consonant gradation, it's funny but I had to make a conscious effort to come up with some examples. It's just one of those things a native speaker is not necessarily even aware of, it just "is" that way. One of the reasons why I'd be a lousy Finnish teacher.

[Pursuivant]

In Estonian they're "texas-pants"

[sammy]

In Estonian they're "texas-pants"

teksaspüksid > teksaspöksyt... maybe that would catch on here too

[Pursuivant]

I vaguely remember a brand "texas" - italian? that must have been a first one in places...

[Jukka Aho]

But "jamekset" I think became almost a generic word for jeans many moons ago, in the late 60's / early 70's. It was derived from a brand of jeans called "James". The brand (and the word) fell out of fashion when "international" brands became more easily available.

The brand name referred to a certain James Dean...

[sammy]

The brand name referred to a certain James Dean...

Yes one would suspect so - then again, we did have diinari (the Finnish equivalent to the term "teddy boy"... another word was/is fiftari, pretty easy to guess where that comes from)