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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?

Piotr wrote: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.

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.

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.

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.

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#)

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

Piotr wrote: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.