The basic principle of word formation in Finnish is the addition of endings
(bound morphemes, suffixes) to stems. For example, by attaching the endings
-i ‘plural’, -ssa ‘in’, -si ‘your’, and -kin ‘too, also’ to the stem auto ‘car’ in
different ways, the following words can be formed.
Introduction 5
auto/ssa in the car (car/in)
auto/i/ssa in the cars (car/s/in)
auto/ssa/si in your car (car/in/your)
auto/si your car (car/your)
auto/kin the car too (car/too)
auto/si/kin your car too (car/your/too)
auto/ssa/kin in the car too (car/in/too)
auto/i/ssa/kin in the cars too (car/s/in/too)
auto/i/ssa/si/kin in your cars too (car/s/in/your/too)
Finnish verb forms are built up in the same way. Using the verb stem sano-
‘say’, and the endings -n ‘I’, -i ‘past tense’, and -han ‘emphasis’, we can
form these examples:
sano/n I say (say/I)
sano/n/han I do say (say/I/emphasis)
sano/i/n I said (say/past/I)
sano/i/n/han I did say (say/past/I/emphasis)
The adding of endings to a stem is a morphological feature of many European
languages, but Finnish is nevertheless different from most others in two
respects.
In the first place Finnish has more case endings than is usual in European
languages. Finnish case endings normally correspond to prepositions or
postpositions in other languages: cf. Finnish auto/ssa, auto/sta, auto/on,
auto/lla and English ‘in the car’, ‘out of the car’, ‘into the car’, ‘by car’.
Finnish has about 15 cases; English nouns have only one ‘morphologically
marked’ case.
The second difference is that Finnish sometimes uses endings wher
Indo-European languages generally have independent words. This is also true
of the Finnish possessive suffixes, which correspond to possessive pronouns,
e.g. -ni ‘my’, -si ‘your’, -mme ‘our’, cf. kirja/ni ‘my book’, kirja/mme ‘our
book’.
Another set of endings particular to Finnish is that of the enclitic
particles, which always occur in the final position after all other endings. It is
not easy to say exactly what these particles mean; their function is often
emphasis of some kind, similar to that of intonation in some other languages.
The particles include -kin ‘too, also’, -han ‘emphasis’ (often in the sense
‘you know, don’t you?’), and -ko ‘interrogative’, cf. kirja/ssa/kin ‘in the
book too’, and On/ko tuo kirja? ‘Is that a book?’.
Another characteristic feature of Finnish is the wide-ranging use made of
endings in the formation of new independent words. Compare the basic word
kirja ‘book’ with the derived forms kirj/e ‘letter’, kirja/sto ‘library’, kirja/
llinen ‘literary’, kirja/llis/uus ‘literature’, kirjo/itta(a) ‘(to) write’, and
kirjo/itta/ja ‘writer’. Derivational morphemes (derived words) can also be
6 Finnish: An Essential Grammar
followed by other endings, for nouns such as case endings, possessive
suffixes and particles. We can then form such words as:
kirja/sto/ssa in the library
kirjo/ita/n/ko shall I write?
kirjo/itta/ja/n/kin of the writer, too
kirja/sto/sta/mme out of out library
Learning the endings is not as difficult as is often thought. Since the endings
are often piled up one behind the other rather mechanically, Finnish word
forms are usually easy to analyse if one knows the endings.
Finnish nouns differ from those of many Indo-European languages in
that there is no grammatical gender. In German there is the ‘der—die—das’
difference, French has ‘le—la’, Swedish ‘en—ett’, and so on, but these
distinctions do not occur in Finnish.
Finnish does not have articles, either (cf. ‘a car—the car’). The semantic
function of articles is often expressed by word order in Finnish:
Kadulla on auto. There is a car in the street.
Auto on kadulla. The car is in the street.
When adjectives occur as attributes they agree in number and case with the
headword, i.e. they take the same endings.
iso auto the big car
iso/ssa auto/ssa in the big car
iso/n auto/n of the big car
iso/t auto/t the big cars
iso/i/ssa auto/i/ssa in the big cars
There are 21 phonemes (basic sounds) in Finnish: eight vowels and 13
consonants. The number is noticeably smaller than in most European
languages. The main stress always falls on the first syllable of a word. The
writing system is regular in that a given phoneme is always written with the
same letter. The converse is also true: a given letter always corresponds to the
same phoneme.
