>On 23/02/07, Henrik Theiling <theiling@...> wrote:
> >
> > Sorry about my question, I am not an expert of Finno-Ugric langs, but
> > I thought that standard Finnish orthography preserves {d} because
> > there are some dialects that still pronounce it /D/.
>
>Finnish does indeed "have" a "D", but the Finnish national standard 
>language
>is a somewhat artificial language which is a compromise between various
>dialects; in the "standard language" "d" is pronounced more or less as "d"
>but this is an invention based on/borrowing from Swedish - as far as I 
>know,
>no native dialect has a "d", pronouncing the sound denoted by "d" variously
>as "r", "j", "T", or other ways.
>
>Jeff

[D] was last used in the old Rauma dialect; the city is located a little 
north of Turku, so Sámi influence is out of the question. (There's no [T] 
however; that's a variant of /ts/ from the same area.) Also, [d] indeed 
isn't attested from any old Finnish dialect. AIUI Veps, one of the 
easternmost Fennic langs, has it however.

I don't count this as a survived PU /D/ however, because Finnish /d/ mostly 
derives from lenition of /t/. I suppose it is possible (likely, even) that 
the fortition of PU /D/ > [t] was simultaneous with the introduction of 
gradation and thus words like _ydin_ ("core") could be considered to 
dialectally preserve an original [D]. Nevertheless, original phone_m_ic /D/ 
(or: a distinction between words that had PU /D/, vs. PU /t/) was certainly 
lost.

I also dout if the Rauman [D] actually exists any more...

John Vertical

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