A finite verb form means a form with a personal ending, e.g. (minä) tule/n ‘I
come’, sinä tule/t ‘you come’, Maija tule/e ‘Maija comes’. In addition to
person, Finnish finite verb forms also inflect for tense, mood and the passive.
The passive forms contain two endings: that of the passive itself, and also a
personal ending -Vn. The enclitic particles can also be attached to finite verb
forms.
22 Finnish: An Essential Grammar
There are six personal endings, one for each grammatical person. The
personal pronouns occurring before the verbs in the first and second person
singular and plural are frequently omitted.
Singular
First person (minä) puhu/n I speak
Second person (sinä) puhu/t you (sing.) speak
Third person hän puhu/u he/she speaks
Plural
First person (me) puhu/mme we speak
Second person (te) puhu/tte you (pl.) speak
Third person he puhu/vat they speak
Finnish has two simple tenses: present, which indicates non-past time, and
past, which indicates past time. There is no separate ending for the present,
and the ending for the past tense is -i-. The personal endings occur after the
tense ending.
Present Past
minä puhu/n I speak minä puhu/i/n I spoke
me sano/mme we say me sano/i/mme we said
he sano/vat they say he sano/i/vat they said
te seiso/tte you (pl.) stand te seiso/i/tte you (pl.) stood
Finnish has four moods, which express for example the speaker’s attitude to
the content of the message.
Mood Form
Indicative Ø
Conditional -isi-
Potential -ne- (and other variants)
Imperative see below
The indicative is the most common of the moods; it has no ending, and
represents an action as a fact or as something that has happened. The
conditional mood is mainly used in conditional clauses; cf. English ‘would’.
The potential is a rare mood, presenting an action as possible or likely.
The personal ending is attached after the tense ending. The fourth mood,
the imperative, is different in that its own ending either merges with the
personal ending so that the two become indistinguishable (second person
plural), or is followed by personal endings that are specific to this mood
(third person singular and plural).
A survey of word structure 23
Singular Plural
First person – sano/kaa/mme let us sav
Second person sano say! sano/kaa say!
Third person sano/ko/on may he say sano/ko/ot may they say
The most common form is the second person singular, which has no ending.
Because of vowel harmony the endings for the other persons also have front-
vowel variants: vie/köön ‘may he take’, vie/käämme ‘let us take’, vie/kää
‘take!’, vie/kööt ‘may they take’. The third person impera-tives express a
wish rather than a command, and these forms are rare.
The passive forms indicate that the performer of the action is an
indefinite, unspecified person, cf. English ‘one (can say that…)’. 4 The
endings for the passive itself are -tta ~ -ttä and -ta ~ -tä depending on the
structure of the preceding stem. Sometimes the final vowels a or ä disappear.
These endings are attached directly to the root form of the verb (or the
derived stem). Possible tense and mood endings come after the passive
ending, and after them comes the passive personal ending -Vn, wher V
again stands for a vowel which is the same as the nearest preceding vowel.
Active Passive
sano/n I say sano/ta/an one says, it is said
sano/isi/n I would say sano/tta/isi/in one would say
sano/i/n I said sano/tt/i/in one said
To conclude this section, the table on the next page shows the order in which
these endings occur. The tense and mood endings are in the same column,
since they are mutually exclusive (the same word form may not contain both
tense and mood endings). Some of the imperative endings are between those
for mood and person, since they have become merged. In final position there
may be an enclitic particle.
4 Translator’s note: the passive will usually be glossed with the impersonal ‘one’ in order to
show the sense of the Finnish, but a corresponding English passive form will often sound more
natural in context (‘one says’—‘it is said’).
