Talk:hämähäkki

Pronunciation

@Surjection@Mikko Paananen@Auringonlasku@Brittletheories@Jouluntähti@Mölli-Möllerö@Puisque@Tropylium To my ear the word hämähäkki is pronounced as if it were a compound of hämä+häkki. I changed the pronunciation line in this article accordingly, but before I proceed to edit all the compounds of hämähäkki, I would like to hear the opinion of other native Finnish editors around. So, please comment.

BTW, we seem to be quite a small club. I may have missed somebody but the eight users mentioned above plus myself are the only native Finnish editors I could locate that have been active since September this year. We can be proud of ourselves plus some other people that are not any more active (e.g. @Jyril, @Jaaari, @Frous) for making Finnish one of the major languages in English Wikipedia. Depending on metric, Finnish is 2nd to 5th largest language here. Other languages vying for 2nd place are Chinese, French, Italian and Spanish. Hekaheka (talk) 13:53, 15 November 2024 (UTC)

I don't think this is phonemic. There is a phonetic secondary stress that affects words like this, which can also be seen in words like manifesti (mani-festi), jäsenistö (jäse-nistö), pyöritellä (pyöri-tellä), tekemätön (teke-mätön) and katselija (katse-lija). The Finnish pronunciation templates add this automatically in the phonetic transcription (shown in brackets). Besides, nine active editors is actually quite many for a language on Wiktionary; I don't think even most European languages have that many. — SURJECTION ^{/ T / C / L /} 14:10, 15 November 2024 (UTC)

This sent me down a bit of a rabbit hole and now I'm reading Karvonen's 2005 dissertation "Word prosody in Finnish", which appears to be bit of a dissenting opinion about how word stress is laid out in Finnish words... — SURJECTION ^{/ T / C / L /} 14:59, 15 November 2024 (UTC)

I agree with Hekaheka, it is pronounced as a compound. A native speaker can test it in a couple of ways, the easiest is whether inflected forms of like hämähäkillä has secondary stress on hä or on the next syllable. [ˈhæmæˌhækilːæ] sounds good, [ˈhæmæhæˌkilːæ] sounds terrible. Another way would be to imagine singing the word in a song with a tune which lands "ki" on the beat - it would sound awkward as well: for example, if you replaced the word "Miikkulainen" with "hämähäkki" in Vanhojapoikia viiksekkäitä, it would sound as a worse fit to the tune than Miikkulainen, thus Miikkulainen is correctly transcribed with /ˈmiːkːulɑi̯nen/ without a secondary stress in the phonemic transcription (between /slashes/), while hämähäkki should have one also between slashes /ˈhæmæˌhækːi/, not only between [square brackets] as it currently has.

Jäsenistö on the other hand is better transcribed without a phonemic secondary stress. While [ˈjæs̠e̞ˌnis̠tø̞lːæ] sounds better than [ˈjæs̠e̞nis̠ˌtø̞lːæ], the latter sounds still much more plausible than [ˈhæmæhæˌkilːæ]. Mölli-Möllerö (talk) 16:59, 15 November 2024 (UTC)

It feels like I would personally stress a word like hämähäkeillä as [ˈhæmæhæˌkei̯lːæ], though. But if we do add a secondary stress here, the correct use of {{fi-p}} would be hämä+häkki, not hämä-häkki (since - represents a morphological boundary). — SURJECTION ^{/ T / C / L /} 17:22, 15 November 2024 (UTC)

Compound-like stress definitely exists in this word, and must have done so for a while: we can note that *-h- in this position should have been lost without stronger stress, as in forms like valmis → *valmihiksi > valmiiksi. No form **hämääkki seems to be even attested despite other dialect variation. (I also remember myself assuming earlier it must be some sort of an obscured compound, though probably etymologically not really.) This does not seem directly significant for the pronunciation of the citation form however, only in inflected forms where stress remains even on a third open syllable like /ˈhämäˌhäkillä/; unlike cases like matalikko → /ˈmataliˌkossa/. Or equivalently, if you prefer, with foot marking: ‖hämä|häkillä‖ but ‖matali|kossa‖. (Jäsenistö doesn't really provide much illustration though, since a heavy 3rd syllable always keeps its secondary stress.)

FWIW there might be a similar issue with various other words too of the structure CVCVCV(C)CV. One is definitely hepokatti (readily parsed as if it were some semantically obscure compound hepo + katti?!), and one other I can think of might be anorakki (vs. I think not in any cases like amuletti, kabinetti, klarinetti where pseudo-compound parsing would wreck the vowel harmony). Further in CVCVCVC*VC*V five-syllabics, at least kalabaliikki I think is usually /ˈkalaˌbaliikki/, as if kala + some "cranberry postpound" baliikki. --Tropylium (talk) 21:11, 15 November 2024 (UTC)