Paragoge

From Freepedia

Paragoge is the addition to a sound to the end of a word. Often, this is due to nativization, and a logical counterpart of epenthesis, particularly vocalic epenthesis.

Characteristic to Finnish as an Uralic language is the vocalic paragoge. Standard Finnish phonotactics, in strong contrast with other languages including those closely related to it, require a vowel to end a word, although words ending in sonorants or 's' are retained from older Finnish. However, should a new loan end in a sonorant, paragoge is in effect. Finnish has, as per Proto-Uralic, only two vowels that it can add, namely /a/ and /i/. The former, /a/, is historical, and in modern usage only in Karelian. However, it has become lexical in modern Finnish, e.g. the cognate to bench was borrowed as penkki, while penkka has the meaning "enbankment". The latter, /i/, is modern, and is added whenever a word is nativized, e.g. bar → baari (here, there is also a long vowel, as the difference is phonemic in Finnish). In addition, it is always added whenever a foreign word need a case ending, e.g. Blairista "from Blair".

It should be noted that whenever the consonant is phonetically geminate, Finnish speakers hear it, irrespective of the native phonemics, thus creating — to Germanic language speakers — apparently inconsistent vowel doubling. In particular, all Germanic stressed short vowels are followed by phonetically geminate consonants in a word-final position, e.g. English rack → techspeak Finnish räkki. This is phonemic, e.g. imp → imppi; cf. impi "virgin".