Finnish: An Essential Grammar

Fred Karlsson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9781317588511
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Languages
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This thoroughly revised third edition of Finnish: An Essential Grammar is grounded in fundamental insights of modern linguistics and incorporates some of the latest achievements in the description of written and spoken Finnish.

It gives a systematic account of the structures of the written language and offers increased attention to the key characteristics of present-day colloquial Finnish. No prior knowledge is assumed on the part of the reader and grammatical rules are clearly explained without jargon.

Features of this new edition include:

• pronunciation guide, including the tendencies in present-day colloquial Finnish

• thorough descriptions of morphology (word structure) and syntax (sentence structure)

• clear rules and an abundance of concrete examples, from both written and colloquial Finnish

• updated vocabulary in the examples

• an effective new scheme for detecting the morphological structure of any word form

• subject index.

This is the ideal reference source both for those studying Finnish independently and for students in schools, colleges, universities and adult classes of all types.

Chapter 1
Introduction

• The relation of Finnish to other languages
• The basic characteristics of Finnish
• What are the special difficulties?

1.1 The relation of Finnish to other languages

The Finnish language is a member of the FINNO-UGRIC LANGUAGE FAMILY. This is quite different from the Indo-European family, to which languages such as English, German, Russian, Swedish, Persian and Hindi belong. Only four of the major Finno-Ugric languages are spoken outside Russia: Finnish, Estonian, Hungarian and the Sámi (‘Lappish’) languages in the north of Finland, Norway, Sweden and the far north-west of Russia. The term ‘Lappish’ is derogatory. The Sámi languages spoken in Finland are North Sámi, Inari Sámi and Skolt Sámi.

The languages most closely related to Finnish are Estonian, Karelian, Ingrian, Vepsian, Votian and (the now extinct) Livonian, which are all spoken around the south and east of the Gulf of Finland. Of these FINNIC LANGUAGES Finnish and Estonian are spoken most widely. These two are so similar in grammar and vocabulary, so closely related, that after a little practice Finns and Estonians can understand each other's languages fairly well. If we group together the other traditionally acknowledged Finno-Ugric languages according to their relations to each other and to the Finnic languages, we obtain the following picture of increasing distance: Finnic < Sámi < Mordvin and Mari < Komi and Udmurt < Khanty, Mansi and Hungarian. Finnish and Hungarian are thus quite distant from each other, and the relation between these two languages can really only be established on historical linguistic grounds. Roughly speaking, Finnish is as far from Hungarian as English is from Persian.

SAMOYED LANGUAGES are spoken by a few small groups of people in the north of Russia, especially in western Siberia. The Finno-Ugric languages and the Samoyed languages constitute the URALIC LANGUAGE FAMILY.

1.2 The basic characteristics of Finnish

There are 21 PHONEMES (basic sound types) in Finnish: eight vowels and 13 consonants. The number of consonants 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.

The basic principle of word formation in Finnish MORPHOLOGY (word structure) is the addition of endings (bound morphemes, more specifically 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. (The character ‘-’ indicates the boundary between a stem and an ending, or between two endings.)

auto-ssa	in a/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	a/the car too	(car-too)
auto-si-kin	your car too	(car-your-too)
auto-ssa-kin	in a/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; Engl...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Abbreviations
• Chapter 1 Introduction
• Chapter 2 Pronunciation and sound structure
• Chapter 3 Word structure
• Chapter 4 Two important sound alternations
• Chapter 5 The declension of nominals
• Chapter 6 The conjugation of verbs
• Chapter 7 Sentence structure
• Chapter 8 The nominative case and the partitive case
• Chapter 9 The genitive case, total objects and possessive endings
• Chapter 10 The six local cases
• Chapter 11 Other cases
• Chapter 12 Numbers and numerals
• Chapter 13 Pronouns
• Chapter 14 Tenses
• Chapter 15 Moods
• Chapter 16 The passive
• Chapter 17 Infinitives
• Chapter 18 Participles
• Chapter 19 Comparison of adjectives
• Chapter 20 Other word classes and clitics
• Chapter 21 Word formation
• Chapter 22 The colloquial spoken language
• Appendix 1 Detecting word structure
• Appendix 2 Material for studying Finnish as a foreign language
• Index