Vieraiden grafeemien väistyminen varhaisnykysuomesta etenkin Jakob Johan Malmbergin tuotannon valossa

• Petri Lauerma

Abstrakti

The abandonment of foreign graphemes in Early Modern Finnish with special reference to Jakob Johan Malmberg's works (englanti)

3/2007 (111)

The abandonment of foreign graphemes in Early Modern Finnish with special reference to Jakob Johan Malmbergs works

In Old Literary Finnish, the graphemes b, c, d, f, g, q and x - as well as digraphs like tz and ph - were more frequent than in Modern Finnish, where they are used mainly in recent loan words and names and some of them in grade alternations. In other cases, these graphemes mostly fell out of use as late as the period of Early Modern Finnish (ca. 1810/20-1870/80). The aim of the article is to describe how the 19th century saw an end to the tradition of spelling the dental affricate as tz, the ks sequence as x, voiceless stops as voiced ones (especially after nasals or l) and the f sound as ph or f. The primary data for this study consists of Jakob Johan Malmbergs (1786-1848) works, which are mainly religious translations published in 1809-1843. The article focuses particularly on his translation of John Bunyans The Pilgrims Progress, because this was published with minor or major corrections in nine editions from 1809 to 1879, thus covering the entire period of Early Modern Finnish. A wider empirical background was established by studying at least one printers sheet (16 pages) of every book published in Finnish during the years of Malmbergs oeuvre. As for later Finnish literature, the study is mainly based on the large digital corpus of 19th-century Finnish at the Research Institute for the Languages of Finland.

In Malmbergs translation of The Pilgrims Progress, orthographical changes occur as follows: tz > ts in 1835, x > ks in 1848, mb > mp in 1835, ld > lt and nd > nt principally in 1848, and ng > nk (in the strong grade) as late as 1857. Voiceless stops disappeared in many loan words from 1835 onwards, and in some grade alternation remnants in 1848 or 1857. The change f > w took place in 1835, but ph > f as late as 1863. In the rest of his oeuvre, Malmberg did not use tz or x at all, and he had already replaced most voiced stops (especially those following nasals and l) with voiced ones in the 1830s (with the exception of some instances of ng). By examining the other new Finnish books published in this period it can be seen that tz disappeared even from religious language in the early 1830s, and x a decade later, and most of the above-mentioned spelling conventions with voiced stops and instances of f (> w) (in secular books) had vanished by the end of the 1830s. In the 1840s, some instances of ng are still to be found especially in religious literature, where ph remained in use, too. During this decade, the orthography (of stops) began to be modernised even in some reprints, most notably in the Psalm Book of 1841. While it is a well-known fact that the New Testament of 1852 and the Bible of 1853 confirmed most of the graphemic features of modern Finnish orthography (only ph > f occurring later on), this study demonstrates that in other religious books, including their reprints, graphemic development was more rapid than has previously been thought.

Petri Lauerma