That’s Finnish for Linguistic Association of Finland, and its initials are SKY, and the SKY Journal of Linguistics is “a refereed general linguistic journal published on an annual basis. It contains articles, short essays or so-called ‘squibs’ and book reviews… The languages of publication are English, French, and German.” And it’s all online. Just at random, I see Anna Fenyvesi and Gyula Zsigri’s “The Role of Perception in Loanword Adaptation: The Fate of Initial Unstressed Syllables in American Finnish and American Hungarian” (pdf) .Lots of linguistic goodness; enjoy!
Great link, thank you! I’m surprised to see such an academic study of what we call in slang, “Finglish” (I don’t know what the Hungarian form is). You might also be interested in a less formal study of Finglish that I came across quite a while ago. I recognize some of the words, but noticed quite a lot of differences in the Finglish I grew up with in Canada. http://www.uta.fi/FAST/US1/P1/RSV/jt-fingl.html
A minor complaint: it is spelled “kielitieteellinEn”.
Oops, sorry—I tried to be careful copying it, but I was afraid something like that might happen. I’ll fix it!
I just recently found your blog, but I thank you for the link to SKY. Because I can partially read German, its cool to see it used besides assorted books and trivia.
The languages of publication are English, French, and German.
Is this strange given that it’s a Finnish association? Wouldn’t one expect to see Finnish at least on the list?
Not necessarily, the journal my department puts out accepts articles in English, German, French and Russian but not Polish.
Some older colleagues sometimes use the phrase ‘congress languages’ (języki kongresowe somtimes including Spanish as well). For language of a more international scope than Polish.
Squibs, I think, came from Oceanic Linguistics, Robert Blust’s journal on Austronesian etc. I think the term has been updated in the internet age to ‘troll’ – something thrown in to upset everyone, and get the discussion moving.
And there’s a very obvious parallel – the Austronesian-speakers, hemmed in (across half the world) by all those Chinese, Japanese, Amerinds, Americo-English, Hispano Sudamericanos, Bantus, etc must face a very similar lonely linguistic situation to the Finnish.
But the obvious difference is that Finns are white, and ‘not worth’ much anthropological time or trouble, so they are doing the necessary studies on their own language very well, by themselves.
What occurred to me while reading that paper was that the originally stressed syllable, if not initial, often becomes a heavy syllable in Finglish, with a geminated vowel in it or a geminated consonant following it: thus English converter, with the accent on the penult, becomes Finglish konvertteri, with the tt marking where the English stress was.
Maybe it’s coincidence but this is hardly the first article I’ve seen on non-European diaspora of Finnish/Hungarian, while I’ve hardly seen anything on similar diaspora versions of Slavic languages for example (though some of them have recognizable forms).
Maybe it’s coincidence but this is hardly the first article I’ve seen on non-European diaspora of Finnish/Hungarian, while I’ve hardly seen anything on similar diaspora versions of Slavic languages for example (though some of them have recognizable forms).
That can happen without borrowing, too: Russian has completely chaotic stress, while Czech mercilessly stresses the first syllable and Polish almost always stresses the penultimate; as an armchair linguist, I have found that Russian stress often corresponds to Czech length — Czech has phonemic vowel length, Russian doesn’t — and that Russian stressed /o/ corresponds to Polish ó which is nowadays pronounced [u] but apparently once was [o:]. Textbook example: water and its diminutive: /voda/ and /vodka/ in both Russian and Polish, but that makes [vV’da:] and [‘vo:dka] in Russian, while it gives [‘vOda] and [‘vut:ka] in Polish.
“Polish almost always stresses the penultimate”
And even when other syllable are traditionally stressed if you move the stress to the penultmate no one will notice or care and most Polish speakers do this themselves either regularly or sporadically.
The stress in past tense plural verbs (1st and 2nd person) are usually regularized in everyday conversation, for example byliśmy (stress on -li- rather than by-) though usually moved to the ante-penultimate in more formal or broadcast language.
The ante-penultimate stress is a relict of its status as two words (byli śmy) and as native perception has switched to thinking of them as one word the stress has regularized.
“Polish almost always stresses the penultimate”
And even when other syllable are traditionally stressed if you move the stress to the penultmate no one will notice or care and most Polish speakers do this themselves either regularly or sporadically.
The stress in past tense plural verbs (1st and 2nd person) are usually regularized in everyday conversation, for example byliśmy (stress on -li- rather than by-) though usually moved to the ante-penultimate in more formal or broadcast language.
The ante-penultimate stress is a relict of its status as two words (byli śmy) and as native perception has switched to thinking of them as one word the stress has regularized.