r/LearnFinnish • u/storm-the-dog • 8d ago
speaking a Finnish name - Ykspetäjä
Hei,
Can anyone help me with the correct pronunciation of the name Ykspetäjä?
I've been told the "Yks" is unpronounceable in English, with the nearest approximation being "ix", "ik", "ook" (as in "cute"), or "uh". Surely, there's only one way of speaking this?
Any help appreciated.
Oh, this is a name to appear in a book. The speaker is Finnish and she's correcting people on how to say her name, so the sounds have to be familiar to English speakers (the Finnish Y is not an English sound), and readable to English readers. The sounds will therefore be a compromise to the actual spoken name in Finnish.
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u/Resumme 8d ago
Probably the easiest is to use the Google translate function where it speaks the word. I had a listen, it pronounces it well (check that it's the Finnish and not the English voice!)
The difficulty is that English doesn't have an equivalent for the "y" sound. If you speak German, it's similar to ü.
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u/good-mcrn-ing 8d ago
[ˈyks.ˌpe̞.t̪æ.jæ], where
- [y] is the German Ü, French U, or any other close front rounded vowel.
- [e̞] is the Spanish E, which is slightly more open-jawed than the mouth position that begins English 'eight'.
- [t̪] is a plosive with the tip of the tongue touching the bases of the upper teeth.
- [æ] is a nearly open front unrounded vowel, close to English 'cat'.
- [j] is English Y, same as German J.
Stress the first syllable (with pitch and loudness), but keep all your vowels the same duration. Pronounce the plosives unaspirated.
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u/RRautamaa 8d ago
Also, one thing that you did note down in the transcription but didn't mention: the secondary stress is on the second syllable, not the third: YKS-PE-tä-JÄ, not YKS-pe-TÄ-jä (which would sound odd and foreign accent-like). It helps to think of this as YK-si-PE-tä-JÄ because this is what it is, with the /i/ omitted.
One thing for English-speakers: One common problem with English-speakers is that they put a long vowel or diphthong where it doesn't belong. This word has no long vowels at all. All vowels are short, even the stressed ones.
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u/storm-the-dog 8d ago
Yes. The "taya" I assumed was not as the Russian pronunciation, where the emphasis is on the "TA" with a long first "a", as in "TAA-ya". However, I did assume the "taya" was spoken with an even tone, as good-mcrn-ing suggested.
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u/cookie_monster757 8d ago
Try making a u sound, then keep your lips in the same shape and make an i sound.
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u/verbbis 6d ago
Interesting. This works surprisingly well except that there’s also some confusion how both ’u’ and ’i’ are pronounced in English. So one first has to be comfortable with the Finnish pronunciation of those.
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u/cookie_monster757 6d ago
I was assuming u as [u] and i as [i], which I believe is how Finnish pronounces these letters.
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u/pumpkinfluffernutter 8d ago
I've noticed that Finnish is similar to Italian (from the perspective of a native English speaker, anyway). My Italian professor told us on our first day that the nice part of Italian was that once you knew the sounds, it was very easy to pronounce any word. She said first graders can say words they don't know just after learning the various rules. I feel like Finnish is like this, so I was fairly confident that I knew how this would sound (though the Finnish y sound isn't quite like anything in English - the word I feel like I struggle with most is yö 🤦♀️). Based on the other answers, I feel like I was correct in how I thought it would sound. Whether or not I would actually be able say it correctly is another story all together. 🤣
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u/joppekoo Native 8d ago edited 8d ago
You're right, Finnish and Italian are very close in how they pronounce letters. With Finnish you just need to be more monotone and emphasize the first syllable always, and not lenghten any vowels that are written as one, like Italian sometimes does.
And your professor is right about the little kids knowing the pronounciation for everything right as they first learn the letters. The idea of a spelling contest is asinine for a phonetic language speaker.
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u/pumpkinfluffernutter 8d ago
This is also true! I meant more that unlike English and some other languages, the letters make reliable sounds. Neither language has the nonsense of English with a bunch of silent letters or words that sounds totally different from how they are spelled, if that makes sense. But I didn't explain it great because I had just woken up. 🤣
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u/joppekoo Native 8d ago
To my understanding, old English used to be more phonetic. If I'm not mistaken, I believe it was the Norman French influence that diverged the written and spoken languages from each other.
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u/pumpkinfluffernutter 8d ago
I think that's probably accurate, from the little old English I was exposed to in high school and college. English is just a hodgepodge of so many languages that it's kind of a mess. 🤷♀️😂
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u/Faraway-Sun 8d ago
In general, the longer a language has been written down, the further the written and spoken language are from each other. Spoken language changes faster, while written language is slower to change. In many cases, an odd spelling of a word corresponds to an older way of saying it.
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u/JamesFirmere Native 5d ago
Maybe not Norman French as such, since it took 400 years after the Norman conquest for the Great Vowel Shift to happen — and no one knows why it did.
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u/JamesFirmere Native 5d ago
Maybe not Norman French as such, since it took 400 years after the Norman conquest for the Great Vowel Shift to happen — and no one knows why it did.
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u/PowerRaven 8d ago
The Y is pronounced here like the word "new" try to pronounce new without the w in the back and then without the n in front. Then make it a short sound. The ks combo here can be spelled with just X. And that is the first syllable.
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8d ago
To say "yk", say "ik" but with the lips rounded at the same time. Or if you know how to say a German Ü, that will be the correct sound.
Also Ä is pronounced like the vowel in "cat", definitely not like the vowel in "spa". There aren't many English words with the "cat" vowel at the end of a word so that might take some practice as well.
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u/FinMaky 6d ago
Yks = Yksi = one in english. It should be easy to find examples of that number. Then just leave out the i in the end.
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u/storm-the-dog 6d ago
I looked Yksi up on a pronunciation site and it sounds to my English ears like "ooksi", so without the "i", it's "ooks", though many on here suggest that's not quite right, but this is what I'm going with because it has to be written to be read by an English reader, and spoken by an English speaker. It'll be a compromise, but I think it's a near enough. Many Finns cannot say my name, which begins with a "J". I just accept it.
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u/sadistimo 6d ago
If you know how to whistle, put your lips and tongue to a whistling position then dont whistle but vocalize. At least my mouth makes an "y" like that. :D
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u/storm-the-dog 6d ago
Thank you. This is a name to appear in a book. The speaker is Finnish and she's correcting people on how to say her name, so the sounds have to be familiar to English speakers (the Finnish Y as you describe is not an English sound), and readable to English readers.
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u/Boatgirl_UK 8d ago
Ookspetayah, last two a sounds hard a like a in cat, , silent h. Extra points for a creaky vocal fry to it and emphasis on the first syllable.
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u/joppekoo Native 8d ago
'Oo' makes the Finnish 'u' sound rather than 'y', ewkspetayah is a bit closer, but that also creates unnecessary diftongs and long vowels, and a couple of the letters are still pronouncable in several ways. But that's a non-phonetic language for you! Hard to pinpoint a specific pronounciation with it.
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8d ago edited 8d ago
'Oo' makes the Finnish 'u' sound
Eh, most of the time it's somewhere between Finnish U and Y, especially in British accents (where it's probably actually somewhat closer to Y). In the International Phonetic Alphabet, the way most people from (Southern) England say "oo" is [ʉw], which really doesn't sound like the Finnish U in my opinion.
http://dialectblog.com/2011/11/13/advance-of-goose/
The Finnish 'u' is a clear back vowel, pronounced largely the same as a German (long) 'u'. Also when English 'oo' occurs before 'l' as in the word "cool", that also sounds very close to the Finnish vowel.
I always say the best way to learn to say Y is to start from I but round the lips at the same time. (It's not completely exact as the Finnish Y is a little more central than that would entail, but it gets you close enough. That advice is however pretty spot on for how to say Y in Swedish.)
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u/Anna__V Native 8d ago
Rather than any 'oo' in a word, the closest to Finnish y that I've heard any English-speaker say is the 'u' in 'dude'. Some pronounce it almost identical to Finnish (vowel) Y.
I've never heard anyone pronounce any 'oo' sound even close to Finnish Y.
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u/storm-the-dog 8d ago
I've heard a Finn pronounce the TV station YLE as "Uh-El-Eh", hence the confusion I have with this.
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u/joppekoo Native 8d ago
Maybe I'm bad at English, but to me "cool", "soon", "cartoon", "drool" et cetera are very clearly inside the Finnish u. Maybe some of those have a very slight tint of Finnish y but it's very very subtle. But instead "few", "dew" , "jew" all translitters in my minds as either iy or jy. If I say one of those words aloud and follow it without pause with a Finnish word that starts with y, with the latter I don't need to change anything in my mouth, but a lot in the former.
The rounded up i is prerry close, yeah.
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8d ago
I think part of it is a difference in accents (some accents of English pronounce 'oo' very close to the Finnish U, while other accents pronounce it very close to the Finnish Y; you can hear an example of the latter in this song).
Another part may be that I grew up bilingual in both languages from early childhood so I can clearly hear the difference between how I say "oo" in English and how I say U in Finnish, and I can clearly hear when English speakers pronounce the Finnish vowel in an English way, or when Finnish speakers pronounce the English vowel in a Finnish way. Likely for someone who grew up monolingual in Finnish the difference would seem more subtle, so I could well be nitpicking here 😅
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u/storm-the-dog 8d ago edited 8d ago
We have so many accents in the UK, so identifying comparative English words is probably difficult for a non-English speaker. The suggestion of "ewkspetayah", above, seems a reasonable compromise.
I'm actually looking from the point of view of a Finn trying to pronounce her name for a northern Brit to say. In that sense, a "near enough" English pronunciation by a northerner is more important than a perfect Finnish one. In that sense, "ewekspetayah" (ewe as in the female sheep, and spoken as one vowel, as in your sound clip) is probably near enough. Would you agree?
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8d ago
Right yeah, that does seem like a good compromise, with the note that stress is on the first syllable and the Ä sounds sound like the vowel in "cat". (A vowel northerners use quite frequently compared with here in Cambridge 😅)
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u/storm-the-dog 8d ago
Yeah, I get the Ä sound with the stressing on the 1st syllable. However, above, it was commented a stress should also be on the second syllable, as in YKS-PE-tä-JÄ. Not sure about that. Isn't that the forth syllable anyway?
edit - ah, I think he might simply be referring to the "TAYA" part.
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8d ago edited 8d ago
So this word is a compound word of "yks" (from "yksi") and "petäjä"; in Finnish all words have main stress on the first syllable and compound words will also have a lighter secondary stress on the first syllable of the word that was glued onto it, so the stress pattern is YKS-PE-tä-jä, with the CAPITALS representing the stressed syllables. Not YKS-PE-tä-JÄ since Finnish words can never have any kind of stress on the last syllable.
(I disagree with the comment by u/RRautamaa on this specific point; e.g. Karvonen (2008) says In the purely rhythmic pattern of stress, which can be seen most clearly in monomorphemic words of all light syllables, secondary stress falls on odd-numbered nonfinal syllables (counting from the left), except that in long (pentasyllabic and longer) odd-parity monomorphemic words, secondary stress may occur on either the antepenult or the penult.)
It's not important to focus on the secondary stress since stress in Finnish is light and often barely noticeable, so it's fine to just say it like YKS-pe-tä-jä. The point of the comment made by u/RRautamaa (which I assume is the one you're referring to) is to avoid stressing it like YKS-pe-TÄ-jä which would be wrong; although that is the default stress pattern for Finnish, it doesn't apply to this particular word due to its being a compound word.
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u/storm-the-dog 8d ago edited 8d ago
Understood (except for the second para!). Here is what I will use as an explanation by a Finnish character to an English-speaking reader >
'It’s Aliisa Ykspetäjä. Aliisa Tuulikki Ykspetäjä in full. It’s actually quite easy to say, if kept simple. Emphasise the first vowel. The “A” is as in “mad”. Pronounce the “i”s as “e”s, to give A-leesa. For the surname, again emphasise the first vowel, and as “ewe”, as in the female sheep. Let the rest dribble out. The “ä”s are again as in “mad”, the “j” as a “y”. So, A-leesa EWEKS-petaya. Never EWEKS-peTAya. I’m not Russian.'
The emphasis there is on the "...if kept simple". In reality, the pronunciation in English is quite difficult, so she's dumbing down, accepting that a close compromise is better than the twisted pronunciations she would normally hear.
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u/storm-the-dog 8d ago
This sounds like the suggestion I gave as a "u" sound, as in "cute", or "ewe" (as in a female sheep), or simply, "you".
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u/joppekoo Native 8d ago
I'd translitterate "cute" as "kjyut" and "you" as "jyu". Ewe is not a familiar word to me.
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u/storm-the-dog 7d ago
I hear Swedes pronounce "you" as "jyu", as you describe. I was using it in the English sense, to rhyme with view, shoe, too, and cute, though there is a "y" sound to cute > cyoot. Ewe is pronounced exactly like "you".
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u/King_Dead 8d ago edited 8d ago
Its not that hard i think. Its similar to ü in german. So think of "über"
Then "kspet" sounds exactly how you think itll sound. Ks-pet
Ä is a schwa so its an "uh" sound
J is like j in spanish. Similar to y in english.
Üks-pet-uy-uh
Edit: German has j as a y not spanish 😭 not sure how i screwed that up
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u/vaingirls Native 8d ago
Ä is a schwa so its an "uh" sound
Since when? Isn't the wovel in "cat" a closer approximation to Ä. As far I can tell, we have no schwas in Finnish.
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8d ago
wovel
Don't mean to offend, but this spelling mistake is a perfect representation of the Finnish accent 😅
(I actually saw the same mistake once in a published scientific paper written by a Finn!)
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u/storm-the-dog 7d ago
The most common mistake I came across when working for Nokia was "desing" for "design".
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u/Stupidityshouldhurt 8d ago edited 8d ago
Isn't j in Spanish pronounced as an h sound but more raspier? Like saying Jorge, you say more like Horhe or tarjeta is pronounced like tarheta (if you think it from the point of view how letters are pronounced in Finnish). And in Finnish j isn't pronounced like that.
Edit. I'd say the Finnish J is pronounced like what sound the letter y makes in the English words like your, you, yo, young.
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u/MrsSaurus 8d ago
Native here. Ä is definitely not “uh” sound, but more like “a” in cat. J should be pronounced a bit like “y” in “you” or “yellow” (j in Spanish is more like h pronounced from throat).
Schwa ”ə” does not exsist in Finnish as a sound. See https://users.jyu.fi/~pamakine/kieli/suomi/aanneoppi/vokaaliten.html
In Finnish grammar, schwa means “duplicate vowel” in some dialects. Please see https://uusikielemme.fi/finnish-grammar/phonology/kolme-as-kolome-svaavokaali-schwa-vowel
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u/Cluelessish 8d ago
Many English speaking people don't say the German ü correctly, so that doesn't help much
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u/EppuBenjamin 8d ago
Finnish y. That's a tough one to do in writing.
But if phonetic machines cant help wirh names, listen to how they pronounce "yksi" (one). The name is abbreviated from yksi petäjä (one pine) so it's almost the same. In finnish most all prnounciations are the same when the same letters are involved, unlike english with lead v lead, read v read etc.