Useless factoid before Semifinal_1 of the
#EurovisionSongContest tonight:
The entry from
#Finland is sung in
#Finnish and since the lyrics are mostly in spoken (not standard) Finnish the text is missing 77 out of a total of 346 syllables.
#Langsky
#Eurovision
#ESC
#ESC2026
#Eurovision2026Syllable count in Finnish is not trivial since the language has a lot of hiatus. So, the pronoun "si.nu.a" 'you (partitive)' is counted to have three syllables because of the prosody, phonotactics and morphology. The spoken correlate "sua" is ambiguous (one or two?) since -u(a)- carries main stress.
So, in the very beginning, for example, the spoken version of the verb "häi.py.ä" => "häi.pyy" loses one syllable when the vowel is levelled. In fact, I believe this change is likely driven by syllable reduction. The histrorical form of "häipyä" is *häipydä so it could also be spelled häipy'ä.
Two caveats though: I am not an expert in Finnish, just a fluent L2 speaker and a linguist.
My mother tongue is in fact Swedish, just as the native language of the violinist is, who by the way does not sing at all in the show, except with her violin.
#langsky
eurovisionworld.com/eurovision/2...Eurovision 2026 Finland: Linda...
Johan Schalin
