Glottal stop in Finnish

[Niedokonany]

Wikipedia claims that the glottal stop only occurs at word boundaries due to sandhi in Finnish, while this page suggests that [?] is a result of consonant gradation. Who's wrong?

[TomHChappell]

Wikipedia claims that the glottal stop only occurs at word boundaries due to sandhi in Finnish, while this page suggests that [?] is a result of consonant gradation. Who's wrong?

Why are those contradictory to each other? I believe it's possible they're both right.

[Soap]

They do contradict each other. The Wikipedia article says it occurs only finally, and is silent except (apparently) before a word beginning with a vowel. The other page has it occurring in place of a now-lost /k/ in a few words.

[Nortaneous]

Finnish did have *k > ʔ word-finally, at least in some cases, so it's at least plausible, but I always thought /k/ was just deleted in consonant gradation. And this is an exercise for some sort of programming class so I wouldn't trust it all that much.

This (PDF) says that "neither [ʔ] nor [ʔː] ever occur within a word". Read sections 5.2 and 5.3 for more information on Finnish /ʔ/. Basically, some word-final consonants were lenited into what the authors call "x-morphemes", which trigger boundary lengthening, which surfaces between two vowels as [ʔː], but glottal stops can also appear in front of word-initial vowels.

[Niedokonany]

Other sources confirm that the words have an orthographic apostrophe in them but it's hard to find out whether it can correspond to any phonetic reality or not. There's this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk%3AFin ... aa.27an.3F

So the glottal stop might be bunk except for very slow or hypercorrect speech.

[Nae]

Loss of -k- medially due to consonant gradation doesn't result in a glottal plosive, just a syllable boundary.

The glottal final is a result of loss of several kinds of word-final consonants, and the only time it's an actual glottal is when it's geminated between two vowels. For this reason, it's usually just called "jäännöslopuke", and not considered a phoneme. A jäännöslopuke before a consonant causes gemination of the following consonant.

raaka, raa'an is /ra:ka ra:.an/
raw, raw-GEN
anna olla! [an:a? ?ol:a]
give-IMP be-ETC
Anna Ålla [an:a ol:a]
anna kalaa
give-IMP fish-PART [an:ak kala:]

Not all Finnish dialects have jäännöslopuke, like my dialect (though I have it, for some reason).

FINN FACT: jäännöslopuke is autological. native words ending in -e tend to have a jäännöslopuke (otherwise they'd end with -i due to e# > i#)

[Niedokonany]

Kiitos. Is there a phonetic difference between /a.a:/ and /a:.a/?

[Nae]

Kiitos. Is there a phonetic difference between /a.a:/ and /a:.a/?

You will never find /a.a:/ in Finnish, because only /a:.a/ is a valid context for consonant gradation.

EDIT: There's a difference. A pause, not glottal closure, but cessation of breath.