# Finnish: "meri"-sanan vokaalisointu



## sakvaka

Vaikka perusmuodossaan sana _meri_ on vokaalisävyiltään neutraali (eli siis taivutettaessa sen tulisi saada etuvokaalipäätteet - vrt. _mies - miestä_), esiintyy partitiivimuodossa nimenomaan takavokaalivariantti.

N _meri - meret_
G _meren - merien_
P _merta - meriä_
...
I _meressä - merissä_

Ilmeisesti vanhassa kielessä _meri_ taivutettiin partitiivissa _mertä_ (ainakin eräässä 1950-luvun kirjassa tehtiin niin). Mikä kielihistoriallinen tekijä selittää tämän muutoksen?


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## Gavril

For those who don't speak Finnish, this question is about why the noun *meri* "sea" does not follow the expected vowel-harmony pattern in some of its case forms. The partitive singular form is _*merta*, _with a final back vowel, whereas the partitive plural is _meriä_, with a final front vowel as expected. 

The same phenomenon is seen with the noun *veri* "blood", whose partitive singular is *verta* rather than expected *_vertä_.

So far I haven't found a widely-accepted explanation for _merta_ and _verta_, but perhaps _verta _was contaminated by the similar but unrelated noun *verta* (as in _vertaansa vailla_ "beyond compare", etc.), where the -_ta_ is part of the stem rather than a case suffix. _verta_ could then have influenced the declension of the phonetically similar noun _meri_. There is also a noun_ *merta*_ "crayfish pot" which could have had some influence on the declension of _meri._


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## ahvalj

The vowel harmony in Baltic-Finnic languages does not automatically operate in words with the root _i_ and _e_, cp. _ilma/silmä _(and_ silmä/silmu_),_ helma/hedelmä, sika/mikä, metso/metsä_. There are two possible explanations of this: either that the _e_ and _i_ of the first vowel never fully managed to define the vocalism of the rest of the word, or that the language had in the past special back counterparts in form of _e̮_ and _i̮_ (both these sounds exist in some Baltic-Finnic languages, though not exactly in the positions required for this latter explanation). Back to _meressa_/_merissä_: since nevertheless the tendency towards back/front harmony exists in the language, the presence of two consequent front vowels was apparently enough to shift the agreement in such words towards the front row.


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## Gavril

ahvalj said:


> Back to _meressa_/_merissä_: since nevertheless the tendency towards back/front harmony exists in the language, the presence of two consequent front vowels was apparently enough to shift the agreement in such words towards the front row.



That's a possibility, but did you mean to write _merta_/_meriä_ (partitive singular/plural) above? Both _meressä_ (inessive singular) and _merissä_ (inessive pl.) end in a front vowel.


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## ahvalj

Gavril said:


> That's a possibility, but did you mean to write _merta_/_meriä_ (partitive singular/plural) above? Both _meressä_ (inessive singular) and _merissä_ (inessive pl.) end in a front vowel.


Well, I meant a "fronter" front vowel, which is _i_.

If we look at the prehistory of these forms, we'll get the same proportion:
*mere — meret
meren — *merejen
*mereta — *merejta
*meresna — *merejsna

Even two consecutive _e_'s were not enough to move this word to the fronted type, but when _ej_ monophthongized into _i_, the language started to produce fronted endings. The singular -_essä_ vs. -_ta_ must be influenced by the longer plural form. Actually, all these are not my speculations, but the explanations you usually find in the books on the Baltic-Finnic languages.


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## Gavril

The question then becomes why _merta_ / _verta_ end in a back vowel, but the partitive singular of words with a similar vowel pattern (e.g. *pientä* : _pieni_ < *_pēne_ "small", _*kieltä* _:_ kieli_ < *_kēle_ "tongue", *vettä* < _vesi_ "water") does not.

Perhaps the answer has to do with the overall frequency of the words _meri_ and _veri_ (they are probably slightly less frequent than _pieni_ or _vesi_ at least), and possible contamination from unrelated nouns (as mentioned in post #2).


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## ahvalj

Gavril said:


> The question then becomes why _merta_ / _verta_ end in a back vowel, but the partitive singular of words with a similar vowel pattern (e.g. *pientä* : _pieni_ < *_pēne_ "small", _*kieltä* _:_ kieli_ < *_kēle_ "tongue", *vettä* < _vesi_ "water") does not.
> 
> Perhaps the answer has to do with the overall frequency of the words _meri_ and _veri_ (they are probably slightly less frequent than _pieni_ or _vesi_ at least), and possible contamination from unrelated nouns (as mentioned in post #2).


Because there is no rule that nouns on _CeCe_- must belong to the front row; it is just a tendency. The vowel harmony has expanded in the course of the evolution of Finnish/Carelian: e. g., _ö_ is secondary in all non-initial syllables.


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## Gavril

ahvalj said:


> Because there is no rule that nouns on _CeCe_- must belong to the front row; it is just a tendency.



The question is why the only exceptions to this tendency *within* an inflectional paradigm are the two forms _merta_ and _verta_. The initial poster said that the regular partitive singular form _mertä_ may have been used until relatively recently: e.g., _mertä_ appears in a book published in the 1950s. I'm not sure if "_vertä_" is also seen in earlier texts.


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## ahvalj

Gavril said:


> The question is why the only exceptions to this tendency (at least in standard Finnish) are the two forms _merta_ and _verta_. The initial post suggests that the regular partitive singular form _mertä_ was used until relatively recently: e.g. _mertä_ appears in a book published in the 1950s. I'm not sure if "_vertä_" is also seen in earlier texts.


I suspect _mertä_ is the attempt of the language to regularize the declension. Tonight I'll try to check what happens with these words in other Baltic-Finnic languages that preserve the vowel harmony and whether there are additional dialectal examples in Finnish itself.


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## ahvalj

Bubrich, the most prominent Russian researcher of the Baltic-Finnic languages explicitly states (1948: 36) that these two forms, _merta_ and _verta_, are interesting exceptions which are completely unclear, especially considering that the first _e_ in these words was originally fronted.

There are however numerous illustrations that the vowel harmony in its present Finnish form is a late phenomenon and e. g. it originally didn't operate in the non-first-syllable _o_ and _u_. In the modern Votic language _o_ often occurs in fronted words: _mänko, syelmo, erägoittaa, päivikko, päätoo_ (this is the rule in the suffixes -_ikko_ and -_too_). Finnish shows words with _o_ and _u_ after roots with _e_ and _i_:_ elää — elo, elatus, elanto; pitää — pito; silmä — silmu_ (cited above); _kesä — kesanto, kesakko; epä- — epatto; sepä — sepalus; kerää — keruu_. 

Likewise, the fronted vocalism may appear in words with _e_ and _i_ in the first two syllables: _kirja — kirjeessä, kirjettä; virkkaa — virkkeessä, virkettä; ilma — ilmiö; perata — perkiö; liika — liietä; hiljaa — hiljetä; mitata — mitellä; leikata — leikellä; vilja — viljellä; keltainen — kellertävä_. This seems to support my idea that (1) *_mere_ and *_vere_ originally belonged to the non-fronted class, _merta_ and _verta_ thus being remnants of the original *_mereta_ and *_vereta_, and (2) the front vocalism first arose in trisyllabic forms, where two consecutive front vowels induced the shift _a_>_ä _(hence _merissä_ and, contrary to my earlier assumption, _meressä_).

By the way, since _meri_ is likely an IE borrowing, it should have had a back vocalism, as in IE only forms with _o_ (Gaulish: _Aremorica_) and _a_ (Latin: _mare_) are attested for this root.


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## Gavril

ahvalj said:


> Finnish shows words with _oand u after roots with e and i: elää — elo, elatus, elanto; pitää — pito; silmä — silmu (cited above); kesä — kesanto, kesakko; epä- — epatto; sepä — sepalus; kerää — keruu.
> _
> Likewise, the fronted vocalism may appear in words with _e_ and _i_ in the first two syllables: _kirja — kirjeessä, kirjettä; virkkaa — virkkeessä, virkettä; ilma — ilmiö; perata — perkiö; liika — liietä; hiljaa — hiljetä; mitata — mitellä; leikata — leikellä; vilja — viljellä; keltainen — kellertävä_.



This is just a side note, but I think it would be better to present the two highlighted examples (which I'm guessing you are quoting from Bubrich) in the following way:

_kirja_ — _kirje_ (_kirjeessä, kirjettä) _; _virkkaa_ —_virke_ (_virkkeessä__, virkettä_)

This makes it clearer that _kirjeessä/kirjettä_ and _virkkeesä/virkettä_ are inflected forms of a different derivative.



> By the way, since _meri_ is likely an IE borrowing, it should have had a back vocalism, as in IE only forms with o (Gaulish: _Aremorica_) and a (Latin: _mare_) are attested for this root.



Yes, the _e_-vocalism of _meri_ (and its Finnic cognates) is one reason why the exact origin of this word is still uncertain. It could have entered Finnic through a non-IE source, or through a now-lost IE dialect.


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## fdb

ahvalj said:


> as in IE only forms with _o_ (Gaulish: _Aremorica_) and _a_ (Latin: _mare_) are attested for this root.



How about Germanic Meer etc.?


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## ahvalj

fdb said:


> How about Germanic Meer etc.?


The Germanic forms with _e_ are results of the umlaut, cp. the older _mari_, _marei_. Actually, the Baltic-Finnic _meri_ is usually considered a rather late Germanic borrowing exactly because of this _e_. I think it is possible, but suspicious as 1) the umlauted forms must be not younger than the 4–5th centuries AC at best (and then why not *_märi?_) and 2) it is hard to understand why the tribes that inhabited the Baltic shore as long as their Germanic neighbors suddenly decided to borrow the Germanic word for the sea. On the other hand I was unable to find this word in the other Finnic languages, so it must be indeed a north-western element (well, most other Uralic speakers never saw the sea).


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## ahvalj

True, Finnish examples in the post #10 are all from Bubrich, but in the third paragraph all the words after "—" belong to the different elements of the vocabulary and in case of nouns on -_ek_ are cited in their polysyllabic forms since the Nominative has no _ä _and since the front vocalism further in the word is explained as a result of the presence of _i_ or _e_ in the first two syllables.


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## Gavril

ahvalj said:


> The Germanic forms with _e_ are results of the umlaut, cp. the older _mari_, _marei_. Actually, the Baltic-Finnic _meri_ is usually considered a rather late Germanic borrowing exactly because of this _e_. I think it is possible, but suspicious as 1) the umlauted forms must be not younger than the 4–5th centuries AC at best (and then why not *_märi?_) and 2) it is hard to understand why the tribes that inhabited the Baltic shore as long as their Germanic neighbors suddenly decided to borrow the Germanic word for the sea.



Another problem for this hypothesis is that the stem vowel of _meri_ alternates between _i/e_ (_mer*i*_ "sea", but _mer*e*n_ "of (the) sea", _mer*e*llä_ "on (the) sea", etc.), which is a mark of older vocabulary.

Most Finnic words of Germanic origin do not show this alternation. E.g. _tuoli_ "chair" (from the same source as English _stool_) has -_i_- in all its singular case forms: _tuol*i*n_ "of (the) chair", _tuol*i*lla_ "on (the) chair" and so on.


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## ahvalj

Gavril said:


> Another problem for this hypothesis is that the stem vowel of _meri_ alternates between _i/e_ (_mer*i*_ "sea", but _mer*e*n_ "of (the) sea", _mer*e*llä_ "on (the) sea", etc.), which is a mark of older vocabulary.
> 
> Most Finnic words of Germanic origin do not show this alternation. E.g. _tuoli_ "chair" (from the same source as English _stool_) has -_i_- in all its singular case forms: _tuol*i*n_ "of (the) chair", _tuol*i*lla_ "on (the) chair" and so on.


I agree, though _tiili_ (_tiilen, tiiltä)_ "tile" looks suspiciously Germanic (Norse _tigl_), where it comes from the Latin _tēgula_, so this form must be very late.


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## ahvalj

Back to the vocalism in _meri_: the Baltic-Finnic sometimes shows strange development of the vocalism in IE borrowings, e. g. _tyttäre_- "daughter" (despite the back vowel of the first syllable in IE) vs. _sisare_- "sister" (despite the front vowel in the first syllable in IE), so it is really hard to tell anything definite about the original form of _mere_-.

Update. In principle _tyttäre_- vs. _sisare_- could be explained from the different vocalization of the Nominative Singular form in IE, *-_te:r_ vs. *-_so:r_ (cp. Lithuanian _duktė/sesuo_), but the Finnic words were definitely borrowed not from the Nom. Sg., and the oblique cases have the grade _e_ in Baltic (_dukters/sesers_) and mostly had a zero grade in Indo-Iranic, so again no obvious reason for the front/back row opposition in these borrowings.


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## Gavril

ahvalj said:


> Back to the vocalism in _meri_: the Baltic-Finnic sometimes shows strange development of the vocalism in IE borrowings, e. g. _tyttäre_- "daughter" (despite the back vowel of the first syllable in IE) vs. _sisare_- "sister" (despite the front vowel in the first syllable in IE), so it is really hard to tell anything definite about the original form of _mere_-.



Since _tytär _comes from a word with earlier *-kt-, maybe the vowel was fronted in the process of the *-k- being lost: *_dukter_- > *_duxter_- > *_duçter_- > *_düçter_-. The word might have been adopted into Finnic around the second or third stage.


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## ahvalj

Gavril said:


> Since _tytär _comes from a word with earlier *-kt-, maybe the vowel was fronted in the process of the *-k- being lost: *_dukter_- > *_duxter_- > *_duçter_- > *_düçter_-. The word might have been adopted into Finnic around the second or third stage.


The problem is, _kt_ doesn't normally cause such changes: it develops into _ks_ before _i_ and into _ht_ elsewhere: _kaksi_—_kahden, _without affecting the preceding vowel, and the development _kt_>_xt_ in Iranic doesn't front the vowel either. Baltic (the most probable source of these borrowings) simply preserves _kt_ and the back vowel intact. So, it is all strange.


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## francisgranada

ahvalj said:


> The vowel harmony in Baltic-Finnic languages does not automatically operate in words with the root _i_ and _e ... _


This is true also for Hungarian, e.g. _vérek_ (bloods)/_célok_ (goals), csí_pek_ (I pinch)/_írok_ (I write) etc.


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