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Finnish Lesson 6: Spelling

17.2.2010 0:01 Mary Nurminen

Today you're in luck! The Finnish lesson is an easy one - spelling. Here is how you do it:

1. Learn all the letters in the alphabet and how they are pronounced.

2. Write them how they're said, 1 letter = 1 sound and 1 sound = 1 letter.

That's it! The whole lesson.

Isn't that nice and easy? Unlike English, you don't have to have spelling classes in school and you don't have to know something about 6 other languages (2 of them dead ones) to be able to spell. If you can say words clearly then you can spell them.

After awhile you get so used to the easy Finnish method that you forget that in other languages you have to spell things out letter by letter. We were in a global meeting at work once and a German colleague was taking the minutes. She started off, then asked, "What's Harri's last name?"

- Silvennoinen, I replied.

- How do you spell that?

And I said, very slowly and with strong enunciation, and of course a little louder: "SIL-VENN-NNOI-NEN!"

As the German looked at me with a blank stare, I realized that clearly I've been here too long.

Of course, the spelling thing is a nice and easy rule and all, but in reality it doesn't always go exactly like that.

This is especially true in Savo, where people freely take sounds out of words and add other sounds in instead of saying what's written or writing what's said.

I learned this early on. Just like in the old joke, the place I worked at in Iisalmi had a summer worker kid named Kauppinen.

I was systematically taught by everyone how to pronounce this correctly - every time I yelled "Kauppinen!", a chorus of voices corrected me: "It's Kaappinen!" (and of course I knew it really wasn't Kaappinen because…well, you know the rest of the joke).

I also learned that 'ei mitään' is said 'ei mittään' and 'Iisalmi' is 'Iisalami'. After some years I moved south and for the first time heard someone say the word 'tänään'.

I stopped the person and said, "What was that word you used?"

He looked at me: - Huh? I thought you knew Finnish! 'Tänään', you know, like in 'tänä päivänä?!

- Oh! You mean tännään!

Things started to get even wackier when I'd been in Tampere for awhile and started to learn the Häme ways of messing with spelling and adding extra sounds to perfectly innocent words.

The letter d is replaced by r (like in that great Häme word tehrään), kauas becomes kauvas, and pois suddenly has 2 syllables.

It's pretty obvious that foreigners should avoid these regional accents - it's hard enough to learn basic Finnish. And natives can know different accents and use them well - speaking only 1 at a time and sounding normal.

But foreigners (or at least me) end up with a few words from one place and a few others from somewhere else, and in their confusion end up throwing them all together and sounding like an idiot.

Like this thing I said one day, and believe me I shocked even myself when it came out of my mouth.

A colleague and I were in a testing lab at work, trying to get something done, and it just wasn't going well at all. After some very tiring hours I said in a crazed Savo-Häme mix: - Ei tuu mittään. Lähretään tiältä poi-jes.

Vocabukary: Spell: kirjoittaa or tavata, Enunciate and pronounce: ääntää or lausua, Blank stare: tyhjä katse, Syllable: tavu.

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