Woods wrote:maukua
indikatiivi: minä mau'un, minä mau'uin, mau'utaan/ei mau'uta, on mau'uttu / ei ole mau'uttu
imperatiivi: (sinä) mau'u!
What are these apostrophes for?
They show where the syllable break is. It matters because it affects the pronunciation. I'm not sure how to best describe it or if my attempt is even correct, but when I think of how I say these words, there's a small pause (perhaps even a short glottal stop) or a light secondary stress after the apostrophe.
Separating the vowels with an apostrophe also helps keeping the word more similar to its basic form, which makes reading and recognising it easier. The apostrophe is always put in the place of lost consonant:
maukua -> *maukun -> mau'un; vaaka -> *vaakat -> vaa'at. It can also be used in the place of a vowel, even though it does not change the pronunciation in this case. For example,
here it's used to mark an omitted -i:
päiväsi > päiväs', soisi > sois'.
I am looking at that phrase "Olei aikeissa soittaa sinulle."
Is the first word some kind of dialect or a mistake? Maybe it should be "olin"? I guess the meaning would have been "I was just thinking of calling you"?
I think it's a typo of
olen or
oli, although it reminds me of the Southwestern dialects where they form the past tense of some verbs without assimilating -e- to -i-, e.g. standard Finnish
miettiä > mietin, dialectal
miettiä > mietein. However, AFAIK
olla is not one of these verbs.
(It is also strange to me that aikeissa is in the plural, but I guess that's just the way it is
Yeah, it's just a fixed expression.