Proto-Finnic language

Proto-Finnic or Proto-Baltic-Finnic is the common ancestor of the Finnic languages, which include the national languages Finnish and Estonian. Proto-Finnic is not attested in any texts, but has been reconstructed by linguists. Proto-Finnic is itself descended ultimately from Proto-Uralic.

Three stages of Proto-Finnic are distinguished in literature.

The sounds of Proto-Finnic can be reconstructed through the comparative method.

Reconstructed Proto-Finnic is traditionally transcribed using the Uralic Phonetic Alphabet. The following UPA and related conventions are adopted in this article for transcribing Proto-Finnic forms:

The Proto-Finnic consonant inventory had relatively few phonemic fricatives, much like that of the modern Finnic languages. Voicing was not phonemically contrastive, but the language did possess voiced allophones of certain voiceless consonants.

The table below lists the consonantal phonemes of Late Proto-Finnic. Phones written in parentheses represent allophones and are not independent phonemes. When a consonant is notated in this article with a symbol distinct from the corresponding IPA symbol, the former is given first, followed by the latter.

Proto-Finnic possessed two phonemic levels of consonant duration, short and long (geminate). The contrast itself had been inherited from Proto-Uralic, but was considerably expanded: all consonants except *r, *h, *j and *w could be short or long. The three plosives and the affricate *c also possessed a half-long duration ([pˑ], [tˑ], [kˑ] and [tsˑ]), but these were in complementary (allophonic) distribution with fully long consonants, and therefore were not phonemic. They appeared in predictable positions as a result of consonant gradation, like the voiced fricatives.

...
Wikipedia