Linguaphile wrote:(Naava, are you around? )
I am around! I'll read your posts more carefully later. We had a very belated birthday(s) party for me and my niece last weekend, and arranging that has kept me busy. I still have plans for tomorrow, but we'll see if I have the energy to come back to you in the evening! If not, I'll try again another day next week.
I'll just quickly have a few words on what I can say so far:
linguoboy wrote: What I don't understand is why there are two different outcome when both words have the same underlying phonological shape: VikV. Why not both *ajon and pojan or aion and *poian? The genitive of aika, the etymon of aikoa, is ajan so is it just an orthographical differentiation between nouns and verbs?
Firstly, we're talking about Standard Finnish here. It's a (to some extent) artifical language created from a mix-and-match of several dialects and individual preferences of people who loved to argue about what the language should be like. I wouldn't be surprised if the reason for aion vs pojan was that someone long ago thought it looks better that way or that the people agreed on some detailed rules for when to use <i> and when <j>, but it could also be copied from a dialect I'm not familiar with*. I need to look it up and see if I can find an explanation!
However, I think it could also be that
ajon would've been a homonym of the genitive of
ajo ('driving', 'riding', 'chase') but there aren't homonyms for
pojan.
* I think it's worth mentioning here that my dialect doesn't make a distinction between these:
(ajan) aika : aijan
(pojan) poika : poijan
(aion) aikoa : aijon
(aie) aije : aikehen
They're either pronounced as /ɑijɑn/, /ɑj:ɑn/ or maybe even /ɑij:ɑn/.linguoboy wrote:This would've been fronted and absorbed by front vowels (e.g. *joɣen > *joʝen > joen)
I'm sure you're delighted to know that in my dialect, it's
joki : jojen.
Linguaphile wrote:linguoboy wrote:Is there actually a perceptual distinction between ajan and *aian? Or is the difference strictly orthographical?
I believe so: /'ajɑn/ vs. /'ai
jan/. I can only say for sure that that's how it works in Estonian; most of my experience with Finnish is written, so I'll defer to someone else's expertise here. (Naava, are you around? ) Given the situation with dialects in Finnish, my guess is that it depends on the dialect, and at least those closer to Estonian would maintain the difference, but some speakers probably don't.
Again, I'm guessing there
(Linguaphile, I'm not sure what's going on with your /a/ vs /ɑ/ there.
)
Yes, they'd be pronounced differently, although
aian feels awkward to say. I don't know how to explain what the difference is though! Maybe it's something like /'ɑˌiɑn/.