【芬兰语语法】§4 WHAT ARE THE SPECIAL DIFFICULTIES?

 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