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From: zwicky@osu-eddie.UUCP (Elizabeth D. Zwicky)
Newsgroups: net.nlang
Subject: Re: Hor.Hacking Finnish/Estonian/Hungarian/Turkish
Message-ID: <802@osu-eddie.UUCP>
Date: Thu, 14-Nov-85 16:46:03 EST
Article-I.D.: osu-eddi.802
Posted: Thu Nov 14 16:46:03 1985
Date-Received: Fri, 15-Nov-85 05:37:20 EST
References: <522@tjalk.UUCP> <> <157@kvvax4.UUCP>
Reply-To: zwicky@osu-eddie.UUCP (Elizabeth D. Zwicky)
Organization: Ohio State Univ., CIS Dept., Cols, Oh.
Lines: 24

In article <157@kvvax4.UUCP> esa@kvvax4.UUCP (Esa K Viitala) writes:
>In article <> zwicky@osu-eddie.UUCP (Elizabeth D. Zwicky) writes:
>  >I like it precisely because it is so regular. Spelling is almost completly
>  >phonetic.
>Only "almost"??

Yeah, only almost. But only if you want to do it really, really _right_.
My Finnish teacher is a native speaker of Estonian, and a phoneticist, and
she wants it _right_. That means making some stress and length of initial
consonant distinctions that are controlled by the presence of glottal
stops on the end of the word before, which are not spelled, or on the
properties of some clitics (They look like separate words, but are
stressed as if they were part of the (usually) preceding word). Syllable
boundaries also make subtle length distinctions, and are not always
determinable from spelling. But I admit it is really really close
to being perfectly phonetic; so close that today I ran across a Finnish
word, which I was told means something like "stringing letters together
to get words when youare learning to read and all you can do is resognize
letters" My Finnish teacher was hoping that I as a native English speaker
knew a word that meant something like that (closer than my book's 
translation "spelling"), but there isn't one, because it won't really work
in English.

	-Elizabeth D. Zwicky