It is worth mentioning the areas of Finnish grammar which can cause most
learning difficulty. Since Finnish is not an Indo-European language the basic
vocabulary differs from Indo-European. The 15 most frequent words in
Finnish are the following:
1 olla (to) be 4 ei no
2 ja and 5 joka which
3 se it 6 hän he, she
Introduction 7
7 että that 12 niin so
8 tämä this 13 kuin than
9 mutta but 14 tulla (to) come
10 saada (to) get 15 minä I
11 kun when
It is immediately clear that learning Finnish words requires an effort. The
burden is lightened, however, by the fact that Finnish has hundreds of direct
loan words (mostly from Swedish) and a great many translation loans,
expressions that have been translated into Finnish equivalents.
Examples of direct loans are the following (both Swedish and English
equivalents are given):
ankka anka, duck kahvi kaffe, coffee kakku kaka, cake
kallo skalle, skull keppi käpp, cane kirkko kyrka, church
kruunu krona, crown pankki bank penkki bänk, bench
posti post, mail sokki chock rokki rock, rock and roll
sohva soffa, sofa tulli tull, customs viini vin, wine
Compound words which are translated loans include: kirja/kauppa
‘bokhandel, bookshop’; olut/pullo ‘ölflaska, bottle of beer’; rauta/tie/asema
‘järnvägsstation, railway station’.
In §3 it was said that the inflection of Finnish words is easy in that the
endings are often attached ‘mechanically’ to the stem. However, this is not
always true. The form of the basic stem (root, lexical form) often alters
when certain endings are added to it, i.e. a lexical word may be represented
by different stems depending upon which endings it is followed by.
Compare for example the inflection of the noun käsi ‘hand’ in different
cases.
käsi hand (hand)
käde/ssä in the hand (hand/in)
käte/en into the hand (hand/into)
kät/tä hand (hand/partitive case)
käs/i/ssä in the hands (hand/s/in)
käsi/kin the hand, too (hand/too)
käte/ni my hand (hand/my)
The basic form käsi takes different forms according to the following
ending and its sound structure. These sound alternations are governed by
rules that can sometimes be extremely complex. Here are a few more
example pairs:
tunte/a (to) know ~ tunne/n I know
hyppää/n I jump ~ hypä/tä (to) jump
matto mat ~ mato/lla on the mat
8 Finnish: An Essential Grammar
maa country ~ ma/i/ssa in countries
tie road ~ te/i/llä on the roads
tietä/ä (to) know ~ ties/i (he) knew
Case endings are usually added to nouns, adjectives and other nominals, but
they may also be added to verbs. 3
Minä lähden Jyväskylä/än. I’m going to Jyväskylä.
Minä lähden kävele/mä/än. I’m going ‘walking’ (= for a walk).
The verb form kävelemään literally means ‘into walking’, just as
Jyväskylään means ‘into (the town of) Jyväskylä’. Both forms contain the
case ending -än meaning ‘into’.
The object in Finnish is marked by a case ending. In the two following
sentences the ending -n indicates ‘this word is the object of the sentence’.
The rules governing the use of this ending and the other possible object
endings are fairly complex.
Minä ostan kirja/n. I (shall) buy the book.
Kalle näki auto/n. Kalle saw the car.
The most difficult feature of the pronunciation of Finnish is the length
(duration) of the sounds: differences of length serve very frequently to
distinguish separate words. Compare pairs such as:
kansa people – kanssa with
tuli fire – tulli customs
muta mud – mutta but
muta mud – muuta other
muta mud – mutaa mud (partitive case)
tuulee it is windy – tuullee it is probably windy
