Francois Labreque <fla### [at] videotronca> wrote:
> How does Finnish deal with foreign words?

  How does any language deal with foreign words?

  Most loanwords are "finnishized", in both pronounciation and writing
(spoken Finnish doesn't have nearly as many phonemes as many other languages,
including English, which means that most finns can't even pronounce many
English words correctly because of lack of practice).

  If a foreign name cannot be changed (eg. because it's a proper name, eg.
the name of a person or a company), then it's just written as it is (if the
name happens to have some letter not in the Finnish alphabet, then how it's
dealt with varies from medium to medium and person to person).

  Country names are usually "finnishized", with rare exceptions. Other
foreign place names are usually not, but writte as-is, with the exception
of some very known very old place names, like some ancient cities. (Eg. the
city of Rome is written in Finnish as "Rooma". If the city had been founded
last year, it would probably be written and pronounced as-is, ie. "Roma".
Another example is London, which is "Lontoo" in Finnish. If it were founded
today, it would be just "London" in Finnish too.)

  This actually causes some awkward things. For example, to a Finn,
"New York" is not pronounced as it is written. And if you tried to
pronounce as it is written, it would be very awkward and unnatural. It's
known enough that most people get the English pronounciation at least
approximately correctly. It's much harder with lesser known place names.
(Britons would have a fun time watching a Finn trying to pronounce
"Worcestershire".)

>  For example, the "ch" in many 
> words of greek origin (psychology, chaos, stochiometry, chemistry, 
> etc...), are they rewritten or taken as is?

  Common terms are rewritten and the pronounciation made more Finnish.
(Psykologia, kaaos, stokiometria, kemia.)

> While it is not as hard as in English or German, the h in spanish is 
> still not completely silent.  For example, the s sound of "los" in "Los 
> Angeles" carries into the second word, whereas in "Los haciendas", it 
> doesn't, and in some words, such as "hombre", it is indeed pronounced.

  Ok, the H can cause a slight change in rythm in some situations, which
makes it distinguishable from a similar situation without an H. Still feels
a bit "wasteful", though.

  I have never heard "hombre" pronounced any differently from (the
fictitious word) "ombre". (I have lived in Spain for 12 years.) I don't
know if it's different in Latin America.

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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