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The table below lists the conventionally postulated diphthongs in Finnish. In speech (i.e. phonetically speaking) a diphthong does not sound like a sequence of two different vowels; instead, the sound of the first vowel gradually glides into the sound of the second one with full vocalization lasting through the whole sound.
The "extra length" of a long vowel is a full mora, and thus stays in its original position, making the new vowel long. sanan muunnos [sa-nan mu-ːnnos] → [mu-nan sa-ːnnos] → munan saannos. If necessary, stilted diphthongs are converted into allowed diphthongs as per phonotactics. The first vowel is the determinant for choosing the diphthong.
In linguistics, vowel length is the perceived length of a vowel sound: the corresponding physical measurement is duration.In some languages vowel length is an important phonemic factor, meaning vowel length can change the meaning of the word, for example in Arabic, Czech, Dravidian languages (such as Tamil), some Finno-Ugric languages (such as Finnish and Estonian), Japanese, Kyrgyz, Samoan ...
Finnish also denotes stress principally by adding more length (approximately 100 ms) to the vowel of the syllable nucleus. This means that Finnish has five different physical lengths. (The half-long vowel is a phonemically short vowel appearing in the second syllable, if the first—and thus stressed—syllable is a single short vowel.)
In Finnish, both vowels and consonants may be either short or long. A short sound is written with a single letter, and a long sound is written with a double letter ( digraph ). It is necessary to recognize the difference between such words as tuli /ˈtu.li/ 'fire', tuuli /ˈtuː.li/ 'wind' and tulli /ˈtul.li/ 'customs'.
The charts below show the way in which the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) represents Finnish language pronunciations in Wikipedia articles. For a guide to adding IPA characters to Wikipedia articles, see Template:IPA and Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Pronunciation § Entering IPA characters .
Between two unstressed short vowels (i.e. in the weak grade of suffixal gradation), *ð and *h were lost (but not after a diphthong, cf. illative plurals in -oihin, verbs in -oida); these may be preserved in a variety of dialects. After a stressed vowel, *ð remained up until the dissolution of the Finnish dialects.
Finnish phrases using the second infinitive can often be rendered in English using the gerund. The second infinitive is formed by replacing the final a/ä of the first infinitive with e then adding the appropriate inflectional ending. If the vowel before the a/ä is already an e, this becomes i (see example from lukea 'to read').