Category: Finnish is Easy

Finnish nouns ending in –e in the Nominative are a slightly odd group. Normally, when a Finnish word ends in a vowel, you simply add the endings directly after the vowel, possibly changing the stem slightly in the process. However, this group is different.

If we take a second to delve into Finnish historical linguistics, we learn that all of the native Finnish words ending in –e in the Nominative in the modern language (which is quite a few words) used to end in a consonant, which got worn down to a glottal stop over time (which is not written but is still pronounced in the Nominative!). In cases other than the Nominative, consonant gradation has eliminated this consonant entirely, but not before speakers had already inserted another epenthetic –e– before the endings. Hence, these words now have a stem ending in –ee in all forms other than the Nominative Singular.

The other interesting feature of these nouns is that their consonant gradation pattern is reversed compared to what you might already be used to on other nouns: the Nominative Singular gets the weak grade, and all other forms get the strong. However, this is unsurprising if we think about it for a moment or two — the Nominative Singular used to end in a consonant, and thus a closed syllable, triggering the weak grade, whereas in the other forms this consonant had slid over into the following syllable (to go with the epenthetic vowel), leaving the original last syllable of the stem open. Thus, we get words like sade, sateen ‘rain’.

It is worth bearing in mind that some words, especially names and very recent foreign loans, don’t actually belong to this group, and are declined as if they ended in a different vowel. However, these words are usually easy to identify, and you probably won’t confuse anyone too much if you get one or two declensions wrong.

This has been a short post, but it’s something worth knowing!

One group of Finnish nouns that can cause problems for beginners is the nouns that end in –i in the nominative singular, but have a stem ending in –e– in all other forms, such as nimi, nimen ‘name’ and talvi, talven ‘winter’.

One solution, of course, is simply to memorize all of these words separately. This is actually a much less arduous task than one might imagine, since the nouns that fall into this class tend to be words for basic concepts that have been in the language for a long time without being replaced by borrowings, and hence there are only so many of them (and you will eventually get a feel for which sorts of words are likely to undergo this change). However, we can do better.

What I would suggest when confronted with these nouns is to learn the stem, not the nominative singular form as your dictionary may assume you will. Thus, you would memorize nime– and talve– rather than nimi and talvi, and then remember that the –e– becomes –i in the nominative singular (which is in fact what happened historically, although it is unclear what the quality of the original vowel at the end of these stems actually was). You will need to be careful not to confuse nouns with a stem ending in –e– and a nominative singular in –i with nouns that have a stem in –ee– and a nominative singular in –e, but if you always write nouns of the first group with a hyphen after the stem, that should help you keep them separate.

Another rule worth remembering is that a noun whose inflected forms show a stem in –e– (not –ee-!), and that isn’t a personal name, a very obvious loanword, or one of a small set of irregular words, usually falls into this group and will have a nominative singular ending in –i. Do remember to account for consonant gradation though, and also bear in mind that –te– at the end of a stem becomes –si in the nominative singular, when there are no endings after it (hence vesi, veden ‘water’, with the stem vete-). This rule can create homonyms in the nominative singular only: kuusi can mean either ‘six’ or ‘spruce’, but the two words have different stems (kuute– and kuuse– respectively).

This is a short post because there isn’t all that much to say here. If you still find it confusing, leave a note in the comments or feel free to ask directly!

This is going to be a relatively short post, because vowel harmony isn’t all that complicated — it just takes some practice to get right. The basic principle is that there are certain pairs of vowels that can’t co-occur in a word, although simply stating it that way misses a couple of important nuances. For now, let’s take a different tack.

Finnish has eight vowels: i e a o u ä ö y. Vowel harmony would be slightly easier to explain if the vowel represented by y were written as ü (as it is in Estonian), but it’s a bit late for that. Now, the first rule of vowel harmony in Finnish is this: if a word contains a vowel with an umlaut on it (ä, ö) or y, all other instances of a and o in that word must have an umlaut on them (and be pronounced accordingly), and u is not allowed (it gets replaced by y if it showed up in a suffix).

The corollary to this rule is that if a word contains a, o or u (without umlauts), no other vowel is allowed to have an umlaut on it, and y is not allowed in the word. In both cases, suffixes adjust their internal vowels (getting either a, o, or u or ä, ö or y) depending on the vowels that are already present in the stem.

Finally, these rules come with one caveat: a word is more or less defined as a single word stem with its attached suffixes, not as a word written on paper. In compound words, you may see sequences of vowels that violate vowel harmony, because they are technically in separate words that have only recently been jammed together. The word yläosa ‘upper part’, for instance, is perfectly fine in Finnish because it’s a compound.

Okay, I lied a little bit in the last post: there is a bit more to the use of inflectional endings in Finnish than you would assume if you thought of them all as separate words that came after the noun. However, as with the cases, consonant gradation (and vowel harmony, which we’ll cover in the next post) is often presented in a manner that makes it look far more complicated than it actually is. In fact, consonant gradation can be explained in 7 easy rules (plus two caveats). Without further ado, the rules are as follows:

1. Only p, t, k, and consonant clusters ending in those consonants change.
2. If the strong grade of a consonant cluster ends in a double p, t, or k, the weak grade can be obtained by deleting one of those two consonants.
3. Strong mp, nt, lt, rt, and nk become mm, nn, ll, rr, and ng. In all of these cases, the weak form is equivalent to a geminated (doubled) version of the first consonant in the cluster in pronunciation (remember that is pronounced /ŋŋ/).
4. A p on its own or after l or r becomes v; t on its own or after h becomes d.
5. A k on its own becomes v between two u‘s or y‘s; k after l or r becomes j before e or i. Otherwise k on its own or after l or r disappears entirely (it can disappear or not in the cluster hk; this depends to some extent on the speaker and the word).
6. In all other cases, there is no gradation.
7. The weak grade is typically used when the syllable whose initial consonant belongs to the consonant cluster under gradation contains a short vowel or a diphthong ending in i, u, or y and ends in a consonant (remember that the first consonant of a cluster always goes with the preceding syllable). Otherwise, we typically get the strong grade, although there are exceptions, most notably the present passive forms of verbs (but there’s a nice explanation for those too, which we’ll get to in a later post!).

These rules cover 99% of the cases of consonant gradation that you’ll run into in Finnish. When learning new words, keep in mind that the gradation is ultimately a function of the phonological environment that the cluster finds itself in, not the grammatical form of the word — the same grammatical form that gets weak gradation in one verb might get strong in another, for instance, if the two are in different conjugation classes.

Now, one of the caveats I mentioned earlier is that there are some words that don’t participate in consonant gradation at all. Once you’re a little bit more used to Finnish vocabulary, you shouldn’t have too much trouble identifying the majority of these — many (though not all) are very recent foreign loanwords or names. But it wouldn’t be language learning if there was nothing to memorize, and getting the consonant gradation wrong every once in a while isn’t a huge problem.

The other caveat is that, while consonant gradation usually only affects the consonant cluster before the last vowel in a word, there are words (such as the verb työskennellä ‘to work’) in which cluster before the second to last vowel is affected (following the principle given in rule 7). Also, in words with multiple suffixes, you can occasionally see the result of consonant gradation in multiple consonant clusters throughout the word, although those clusters are fixed and don’t change when the word is conjugated or declined.

If any of this is unclear, or if I have made a mistake somewhere, feel free to let me know!

Let’s talk about one of the first things that comes up in almost any discussion of Finnish among people who find the language scary: noun cases. Usually discussions like this lead to people enthusiastically explaining how many of these there are, and how they would never be able to remember all of them. This, of course, is the root of problem, so let’s try and dispel that myth.

Now, first, I want you to forget everything you know about Finnish grammar. Imagine you’re encountering the language for the first time, and perhaps you don’t even know how it’s normally written. With that in mind, imagine someone showed you the following sentence:

Hän	asuu	Oulu	ssa.
S/he	lives	Oulu	in

It’s probably going to be pretty obvious what it means: each element corresponds pretty closely to an English word in the translation “S/he lives in Oulu”, with only two elements — those corresponding to “Oulu” and “in” — being “out of order” in comparison to the English. If I gave you a few more sentences like this (I’m going to pass for now, to keep this post to a manageable length), you’d quickly realize that this is the norm in Finnish: the elements with meanings that in English are expressed by prepositions generally go after the noun.

So how hard is this exactly? In my opinion, not very. Yes, you have to get used to something new, but you also have to get used to a bunch of new words anyway, so there isn’t much additional complexity there.

Now, to get from the sentences above to normal Finnish, all you have to do is remove the space between the noun and the element corresponding to a preposition in English. In speech, this means that they are pronounced together as one word, without any secondary stress on the second element. This, and the fact that vowel harmony and consonant gradation are also sometimes present (we’ll talk more about those later on), are the only reasons why linguists treat -ssa, -lla, and other elements as endings rather than just postpositions.

As an exercise, try talking and writing about who lives in the cities and towns Oulu, Inari, Vantaa, Espoo, and Pori, as well as in a house (talo). You can play around with other words as well, but recognize that there are other processes affecting them as well, and you might get slightly odd forms if you start from those words without reading the next couple of sections.

Happy learning!