How to pronounce Finnish Moomin names
A video about how to pronounce the original Finnish names of many of the Moomin characters.
(12-min video, from August, 2022; from @KatChatsFinnish, a channel intended as a resource for English speakers who are learning Finnish.)
If I understood right, the person who made the video doesn’t know some of the characters’ English names; at any rate, most of the English names aren’t included in the video. So here’s a list of the characters included:
| Finnish | English |
|---|---|
| Muumipeikko | Moomintroll |
| Muumimamma | Moominmamma |
| Muumipappa | Moominpappa |
| Niiskuneiti | Snork Maiden |
| Nuuskamuikkunen | Snufkin |
| Pikku Myy | Little My* |
| Nipsu | Sniff |
| Hattivatit | Hattifatteners |
| Hemuli | The Hemulen |
| Haisuli | Stinky** |
| Mörkö | The Groke |
*The search that led me to this video was an attempt to find out how to pronounce Little My’s name, both in Finnish and in English. Turns out that she was named after the Greek letter mu; for the Finnish pronunciation of Myy, see the video. In English, it turns out that her name is pronounced like the English word my (/maɪ/), rhyming with the English word hi.
**Stinky didn’t appear in the books that have been translated into English, but did appear in the comic strip and in Jansson’s 1980 picture book An Unwanted Guest, which hasn’t been translated into English.