Compares the quantity systems of Finnish and Estonian, revealing important linguistic differences.
The purpose of this paper is to compare some aspects of the quantity systems of two related languages, Finnish and Estonian. Finnish and Estonian belong to the Balto-Finnic branch of the Finno-Ugric language family. They have almost identical segmental phoneme inventories. Superficially it also seems that they have very similar word structures. Often Finnish and Estonian words can be matched morpheme for morpheme or even phoneme for phoneme. Both languages have fixed primary stress on the first syllable of a word. In principle, both are quantity languages: oppositions between short and long phonemes permeate the phonological structure of both. Upon closer scrutiny, however, the quantity systems of the two languages show far-reaching differences.
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Ilse Lehiste (1965) studied this question.
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