Naava wrote:I checked Eesti etümoloogiasõnaraamat and it says there that õhk is a cognate with hehkua, to glow, and that it's been originally hingeõhk. Do you have any theory what happened? I don't see the connection there. Has the word had some other meaning than "to glow" earlier?
Maybe
hehkua is more related to
hõõguma (
hõõgama) and "
õhk" has somehow mixed with
õhkama/
õhkuma ~ fi:
hohkua.
Or maybe "
õhk" actually comes from
ohkima/
ohkama ~ fi:
ohkaa.
Do you decline loan words differently than your own words? Do they ever have consonant gradation?
I'm afraid I'm not exactly sure what do you really mean by loan words. In Estonian we have native words (
põlis- or
omasõnad) which originate from Proto-Finnic and before (and have survived, not just reintroduced from Finnish), loan words (
laensõnad) which originate from everywhere else and artificial words (
tehissõnad). So, most of the vocabulary consists of loan words, even if they have been loaned so long ago and changed so much that it's barely recognizable that they are loans.
Additionally we also have
võõrsõnad (foreign words) which are loan words that haven't conformed or have only partially conformed in Estonian. Are these the words you mean?
Ok, let's take one with a foreign letter:
dren`aaž : drenaaži : dren`aaži (
drainage) <- If the stress is on the last syllable then there is gradation.
Even consonant gradation:
meteor`iit : meteoriidi : meteor`iiti (
meteorite).
Which sound does it affect? It wasn't explained very clearly in my study book...
This can be tricky.
If the long vowel is followed by a short non-stop consonant or a soft stop consonant (ruudu
vs. r`uudu), then the vowel becomes a bit longer and there will be kind of like a pause between the vowel and the following consonant.
If the long vowel is followed by a strong stop consonant (ruutu
vs. r`uutu), then I guess different people can say it differently. The vowel gets a bit longer but the pause is either between the vowel and the following consonant (which I think also gets longer) or the vowel is followed by kind of like a half length consonant which turns into the pause and then back into the full-length consonant again.
If it's the consonant cluster (or long consonant) that gets overlong, then again something in there gets a bit longer and the pause appears somewhere in-between there.
This pause thingy is not exactly like a real pause, but more like this "cutoff" (or however it's called) between the word boundaries in a compound word.
The only thing I can remember was the d - t - tt / g - k - kk / b - p - pp and "it happens in other words too but it's not shown in ortography and we won't help you either". We passed the whole thing very quickly in the lessons, too, but when I met a native Estonian speaker, she told me I was pronouncing t / k / p just fine. Surprisingly I had problems with tt / kk / pp, they were too short.
I think Finnish has tt / kk / pp in careful, slow articulation but t / k / p in fast speech. It could be my dialect/idiolect too. I don't know, but I thought it was funny.
Maybe you didn't have that pause thingy?
One way to show this in orthography would be to also use triple letters. And then for the compatibility's sake also throw away g, b and d, and instead use single, double and triple variants of k, p and t.
This would be... unconventional, but I guess easier to learn.
rutu -
ruttu -
ruttturutu -
ruutu -
ruuuturuutu -
ruuttu -
ruuuttu/
ruuutttu etc...
I don't think I understand what you mean. How can anything fall inside the ground? Maybe a meteor but...
Oh, I meant like the knife or the shovel from the previous example. When falling and the blade of the knife or the shovel goes (at least partially) into the ground, so that it gets stuck, then it "
kukub maasse". But when it just falls onto the ground (or even onto the floor), then it "
kukub maha".
If it really falls completely into the ground (goes underground), like for example there is a deep hole in the ground, then I would say "
maa sisse" or "
maa alla".
What does it mean? I tried to find out but I failed.
It should be pretty much the same as
törröttää.
I think it's related to Finnish
turri, although our "
turri" means
(to turn) into the state of [turri] and "
turris" is
to be in the state of [turri].