🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1992Jul23.135758.2304@dde.dk> ct@dde.dk (Claus Tondering) writes:

   ISO standard 6937 mentions that the Finnish language uses two characters
   that look like S and Z with a small v above (a hacek accent).

   I have never seen any Finnish text that uses these two characters.
   Does Finnish use them? Or has Finnish used them in the past?


Yes, they are used, but very rarely. S with a hacek represents
the sound marked with SH in English and SCH in German orthography
(voiceless palato-alveolar fricative); Z with a hacek is the
voiced counterpart, the sound marked with J in French
orthography. More typically they are replaced with SH and ZH,
although the hacek versions are actually preferred by some people
because they maintain the almost perfect one-to-one
correspondence between phonemes and letters in Finnish. You don't
come across these characters that often because the sounds
themselves only occur in relatively recent loans (ZH practically
only in transliterations). More acclimatised loans tend to have S
(/s/) instead.

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  Juha Heikkila            jheikkil@ling.helsinki.fi