JOURNAL LINGUISTICS

Markus A. Pöchtrager

A Short Note on Finnish Diphthongs

The structure of vowels as dictated by the Licensing Constraints not only accounts for vowel harmony, but also sheds light on another facet of Finnish phonology, viz. labial harmony. Failure of vowel harmony and a gap in the distribution of the diphthongs all boil down to the

reluctance of I to switch roles within roots. In other words, Licensing Constraints, phonological processes like vowel harmony and phonotactic restrictions more and more seem to become different sides of the same coin. The notion of switching, which the analysis builds on, is still only poorly understood, but I am confident that future research in this area will be extremely fruitful and yield exciting results.

This paper explains several important informations about the function of diphthong and when the diphthong itself can be using in conversations and when it can’t be using or fails in Finnish language. As we knows the Finnish language is rich in diphthongs, so it is important for the people who wants to learn Finnish language to knows about the rule of diphthongs in Finnish language and in what ways the diphthongs can be using. And also if we take a look to the explanations in this paper about diphthong we can get important information that is diphthong in Finnish language has a gap. The gap here means that a syllable cannot co occur with another syllable in Finnish language, for example ö and i, say, could not co-occur in a diphthong for the same reason they could not co-occur within the same root.

            Beside that this paper also describe about the vowels in Finnish language. In Finnish language there is a kind of vowels that call vowel harmony and also the certain vowel combinations are absent Finnish roots or at least very rare. It is very important because in language vowels playing important functions but in Finnish language there are some vowels are absent and automatically it will gives some effects to the language.

            Finally we can says this paper is a kind of good and positive papers because usually the people around the world only knows about the rule and the aspects of language in English language and do not care about the rule and the aspects of another language.