The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #67852   Message #1137745
Posted By: AKS
16-Mar-04 - 03:36 AM
Thread Name: Any glottal stops down your way?
Subject: RE: Any glottal stops down your way?
In Finnish, the words beginning with a vowel, in fact begin with a glottal stop, much the same way as in German. Then we have a few occasions where the glottal stop occurs at the end of the word, where it behaves just like the rest of the consonants (=assimilates with next c). It is not a "full" phoneme and there's no letter for it in ortography, though one could name some minimal pairs on it, eg Anna (name) vs anna' 'give!'(imperative singular).
The gs does not occur in the middle of the word, in Fin.

Glottis, btw, is the organ that produces the fundamental frequency of human voice, the vocal cord.

AKS