Kari Suomi

Last updated
Kari Suomi
Nationality Finnish
Alma mater University of Turku
Known for English, Swedish and Finnish phonology
Scientific career
Fields Phonetics
Institutions University of Oulu
Thesis Voicing in English and Finnish Stops: A Typological Comparison with an Interlanguage Study of the Two Languages in Contact (1980)

Kari Suomi was a Finnish linguist who was an assistant professor from 1985 to 2012 in the Department of Phonetics at the University of Oulu. He has researched English, Swedish and Finnish phonology. [1] [2] [3]

Contents

His textbook Introduction to Speech Acoustics has been used for university teaching in Finnish phonetics, speech therapy and vocology since 1990. [4]

His other two textbooks with Toivanen and Ylitalo are Fundamentals of Phonetics and Finnish Sound Theory, 2006, and Finnish Sound Structure: Phonetics, phonology, phonotactics and prosody, 2008. [5] [6]

Works

Academic theses

International publications

Papers from Finnish phoneticians

Textbooks

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Phonetics</span> Study of the sounds of human language

Phonetics is a branch of linguistics that studies how humans produce and perceive sounds, or in the case of sign languages, the equivalent aspects of sign. Linguists who specialize in studying the physical properties of speech are phoneticians. The field of phonetics is traditionally divided into three sub-disciplines based on the research questions involved such as how humans plan and execute movements to produce speech, how various movements affect the properties of the resulting sound, or how humans convert sound waves to linguistic information. Traditionally, the minimal linguistic unit of phonetics is the phone—a speech sound in a language which differs from the phonological unit of phoneme; the phoneme is an abstract categorization of phones, and it is also defined as the smallest unit that discerns meaning between sounds in any given language.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Phonology</span> Study of sound organization in languages

Phonology is the branch of linguistics that studies how languages systematically organize their phones or, for sign languages, their constituent parts of signs. The term can also refer specifically to the sound or sign system of a particular language variety. At one time, the study of phonology related only to the study of the systems of phonemes in spoken languages, but may now relate to any linguistic analysis either:

A vowel is a syllabic speech sound pronounced without any stricture in the vocal tract. Vowels are one of the two principal classes of speech sounds, the other being the consonant. Vowels vary in quality, in loudness and also in quantity (length). They are usually voiced and are closely involved in prosodic variation such as tone, intonation and stress.

Unless otherwise noted, statements in this article refer to Standard Finnish, which is based on the dialect spoken in the former Häme Province in central south Finland. Standard Finnish is used by professional speakers, such as reporters and news presenters on television.

The voiced alveolar nasal is a type of consonantal sound used in numerous spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents dental, alveolar, and postalveolar nasals is n, and the equivalent X-SAMPA symbol is n.

Acoustic phonetics is a subfield of phonetics, which deals with acoustic aspects of speech sounds. Acoustic phonetics investigates time domain features such as the mean squared amplitude of a waveform, its duration, its fundamental frequency, or frequency domain features such as the frequency spectrum, or even combined spectrotemporal features and the relationship of these properties to other branches of phonetics, and to abstract linguistic concepts such as phonemes, phrases, or utterances.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Open back unrounded vowel</span> Vowel sound represented by ⟨ɑ⟩ in IPA

The open back unrounded vowel, or low back unrounded vowel, is a type of vowel sound, used in some spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is ɑ, and the equivalent X-SAMPA symbol is A. The letter ɑ is called script a because it lacks the extra hook on top of a printed letter a, which corresponds to a different vowel, the open front unrounded vowel. Script a, which has its linear stroke on the bottom right, should not be confused with turned script a,, which has its linear stroke on the top left and corresponds to a rounded version of this vowel, the open back rounded vowel.

The close front rounded vowel, or high front rounded vowel, is a type of vowel sound, used in some spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is y, and the equivalent X-SAMPA symbol is y. Across many languages, it is most commonly represented orthographically as ⟨ü⟩ or ⟨y⟩ but also as ⟨u⟩ ; ⟨iu⟩/⟨yu⟩ ; ⟨уь⟩ ; or ⟨ү⟩.

The close back rounded vowel, or high back rounded vowel, is a type of vowel sound used in many spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is u, and the equivalent X-SAMPA symbol is u.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Near-open front unrounded vowel</span> Vowel sound represented by ⟨æ⟩ in IPA

The near-open front unrounded vowel, or near-low front unrounded vowel, is a type of vowel sound. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is æ, a lowercase of the ⟨Æ⟩ ligature. Both the symbol and the sound are commonly referred to as "ash".

Syntactic gemination, or syntactic doubling, is an external sandhi phenomenon in Italian, other Romance languages spoken in Italy, and Finnish. It consists in the lengthening (gemination) of the initial consonant in certain contexts. It may also be called word-initial gemination or phonosyntactic consonantal gemination.

The mid front unrounded vowel is a type of vowel sound that is used in some spoken languages. There is no dedicated symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents the exact mid front unrounded vowel between close-mid and open-mid, but it is normally written e. If precision is required, diacritics may be used, such as or ɛ̝. In Sinology and Koreanology, ⟨ᴇ⟩ is sometimes used, for example in the Zhengzhang Shangfang reconstructions.

The mid front rounded vowel is a type of vowel sound, used in some spoken languages.

The mid back rounded vowel is a type of vowel sound, used in some spoken languages. While there is no dedicated symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents the exact mid back rounded vowel between close-mid and open-mid, it is normally written o. If precision is desired, diacritics may be used, such as or ɔ̝, the former being more common. There was an alternative IPA symbol for this sound, ⟨ꭥ⟩. A non-IPA letter is also found.

The voiceless alveolar fricatives are a type of fricative consonant pronounced with the tip or blade of the tongue against the alveolar ridge just behind the teeth. This refers to a class of sounds, not a single sound. There are at least six types with significant perceptual differences:

Klaus J. Kohler is a German phonetician.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Peter Roach (phonetician)</span> British retired phonetician (born 1943)

Peter John Roach is a British retired phonetician. He taught at the Universities of Leeds and Reading, and is best known for his work on the pronunciation of British English.

Timo Leino founded the Department of Speech Technique in the University of Tampere in 1974. He was the head of Department from 1974 to 2001. Leino pioneered speech analysis in Finland. He worked to develop speech education in Finland.

Anne-Maria Laukkanen is a Finnish researcher (1990–) and a permanent full professor (2001–) of speech technique and vocology at the University of Tampere.

References

  1. "researchgate: Publications I" . Retrieved August 16, 2019.
  2. "skmiod: Publications II" . Retrieved August 16, 2019.
  3. "WorldCat: Publications III" . Retrieved August 16, 2019.
  4. "Introduction to Speech Acoustics" . Retrieved August 16, 2019.
  5. "Introduction to phonetics and Finnish sound theory" . Retrieved August 16, 2019.
  6. "Finnish sound structure" (PDF). Retrieved August 16, 2019.