Proto-Finnic Final Consonants I/1. [antikvár]

FOREWORD This work originally grew out of another research project. Between 1958 and 1962 I made a systematic collection of field-notes from over twenty parishes, laying the foundation of a monograph to illustrate diachronically the dialect geography of the Finnish dialects spoken in the province of Pâijât-Hâme. It soon became clear from the material collected that many of the basic problems concerning these dialects, which originally, in all appearance, belonged to the Hâme-type dialect area but have a very strong Savo-type overlay, could not be satisfactorily solved without some comparative studies on the other Finnish dialects. One of these problems was the development of Proto-Finnic final consonants. The work to be done on the other dialects proved to be much more extensive, however, than could be anticipated: in addition to the Finnish dialects, the other Finnic languages had to be included, and the history of Proto-Finnic final k alone provided sufficient material for a book. The largest part of this book appears here as a doctoral dissertation; it includes an introduction and a discussion of the history of -k in the Finnish dialects. It is hoped that it will not be very long before the book can be published in a complete form. The complete version will include a survey of the history of -k in the other Finnic languages and a separate account of the form-groups that seem to presuppose original -k in some of the Finnic languages or dialects but an alternative original final phoneme in others. The work presented many difficulties. In spite of the existence of many excellent dialect monographs and extensive lexical collections made during the last few decades the sources of the Finnish dialects have not been exhausted yet. The need of additional material has proved particularly great for the clarification of such features as the sandhi phenomena, which present difficult problems of observation. Fortunately I became interested in these phenomena in the early stages of my linguistic field-work and have thus been able to use my own field-notes from not only Pâijât-Hâme and its environs but many other Finnish dialect areas as well. Altogether 97 parishes are, on the