I'm not really sure how to describe the pronunciation. The vowels are short. The 'o' is like a British short 'o' in words like shop or pot. The 'i' is also short, like in pit. (At least to me, describing the last syllable as
vee makes the 'i' seem longer than it should be.)
The real difficulty is the h. It's pronounced, but it's not guttural. It's a soft h sound.
And, yes, the stress is on the first syllable, as in all Finnish words and names. No exceptions.
I'm not sure if any of this makes sense. If you can get it to work, there's a Finnish speech synthesizer,
www.mikropuhe.com/demo.asp, that will pronounce any Finnish name correctly. Just write the name in the text field and click on 'Kuuntele puhe'.
This message was edited 4/5/2006, 8:33 AM