Re: Secondary stress in Finnish

On 2008-04-30, Craoibhin66@xxxxxxxxx wrote:

I'm certainly not such a person, but here's what Tiit-Rein Viitso in the
Routledge book on Uralic has to say on the matter:

"In all Fennic dialects [...] most words have primary stress on the
first syllable. Quadrisyllabic and longer words have secondary stress on
odd non-final syllables, i.e. there is a tendency towards trochaic
stress patterning [OK, we all knew that]. [This] is counteracted by
certain derivational suffixes that attract secondary stress , e.g.
Finnish 'pakenem`ninen, escaping. In addition, in Finnish [...],
quinquesyllabic and longer words with a short third and a long fourth
syllable have their secondary stress on the fourth syllable, e.g.
'todel'lisenl, real (sing Genitive), todelli'sessa, real (sing
Inessive).
In some Finnish dialects [there are further complications]."

So, consider yourself confirmed.

It's a bit more complicated than I said, but that's not too
surprising.


Pakeneminen, actually. But yes, that's how it works. I can think of
only two words which have normally non.initial stress, and one of them
is a recent loanword from English: "jumalauta" and "okei". Both can
have initial stress too.

Interesting, thanks.


--
Classical Greek lent itself to the promulgation of a rich culture,
indeed, to Western civilization. Computer languages bring us
doorbells that chime with thirty-two tunes, alt.sex.bestiality, and
Tetris clones. (Stoll 1995)
.

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