Embed Notice

@polarisera You would insert a word break where the hyphen is, in this case. Finnish can use hyphenation to signify that one part of a compound refers to entire second half of the compound, though I’m not quite up to date on whether it’s at this time officially sanctioned usage or not.

You’d insert a word break by using stress patterns. Finnish places the stress almost exclusively on the first syllable of the word, and that’s a handy way of signifying which strings are e.g. compounds and which aren’t. So the hyphen in this case would be treated as if it was a word break, i.e. you’d place the stresses like this: An-ti-Per-voteoria. If you had the second meaning, the non-hyphenated one, the stress would be Antipervoteoria.

EDIT to add para: You would also, if you speak slowly, add a small break in between, as you would between any two words normally. But if you are a quick speaker, this might not apply, so the stress would be the primary tool.

The stress is also used in the cases where the compound break would otherwise contain two or more identical vowels. Finnish has quantity opposition, meaning that a and aa, which are identical in phonetic quality but differ in length, are different meaning units. Therefore words like matka-arkku have to be hyphenated to indicate that the wovels in the middle are a and a, rather than a single aa. (The word means a trunk.)