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Finnish grammar | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| Jordan152 Newbie United Kingdom Joined 5821 days ago 39 posts - 35 votes Studies: English, Finnish | Message 1 of 6 17 October 2011 at 10:51pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Hello, could someone tell me what are the most important aspects of Finnish grammar?
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| jdmoncada Tetraglot Senior Member United States Joined 5034 days ago 470 posts - 741 votes  Speaks: English*, German, Spanish, Finnish Studies: Russian, Japanese | Message 2 of 6 18 October 2011 at 12:15am | IP Logged | |||||
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That is a very broad question, and you may not get the best answer because of it. I will give you a general answer in return.
Vowel harmony is a big deal. It's not hard to learn, but it's important. For example, AOU go together and can play with EI. The other set of vowels (can't type 'em right now. Sorry.) go together and can use EI. You'll never find an individual word that mixes the vowels. Compound words can do that, but the individual words that make the parts will never have mixed vowels. The other big deal thing in the language is obviously the use of grammatical cases. The agglutination is part of the wonder and beauty of the language. For example, there are 6 locative cases alone, and those will be the first you likely learn. They describe both internally and externally where things are going to, where they are right now, and where they are coming from. You'll also have to learn the partitive case, which is how direct objects are marked. A third big thing is the use of agglutination. It's not merely that Finnish has cases but that several of them can be used together on the same word, which will cause some interesting and sometimes surprising changes in spelling. So in my opinion, for whatever it's worth, those are the big 3 of Finnish grammar to get you started. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Chung Diglot Senior Member Joined 7156 days ago 4228 posts - 8259 votes 20 sounds Speaks: English*, French Studies: Polish, Slovak, Uzbek, Turkish, Korean, Finnish | Message 3 of 6 18 October 2011 at 1:04am | IP Logged | |||||
Not in any particular order, but you'd better know them well enough if you want a shot at making a half decent/reasonably coherent set of sentences in Finnish on your own as a beginner. 1) formation and use of the partitive (singular and plural), genitive singular from the nominative singular. 2) formation of present tense from the "main" infinitive (the formation of tenses and the other infinitives derive from a stem based either on the infinitive or present tense) 3) the grammatical differences between standard and colloquial Finnish - the latter is used A LOT and if you're not comfortable with it you may find "normal" speech to be difficult to understand or grammatically "wrong" (in comparison to the standard as taught to all students). 4) consonant gradation (especially with alternations of "k" and certain clusters with "k") 5) vowel harmony when determining which variant of most suffixes to use The last two are in a gray area between morphology and phonology but if you don't get a handle on them, your sentences' grammar will be interpreted as "off" or at times unclear. 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| a3 Triglot Senior Member Bulgaria Joined 5256 days ago 273 posts - 370 votes Speaks: Bulgarian*, English, Russian Studies: Portuguese, German, Italian, Spanish, Norwegian, Finnish | Message 4 of 6 18 October 2011 at 10:27am | IP Logged | |||||
Standart language is very regular albeit it has thousands of rules. On the contrary, the colloquial language to me seems a random shortening of words that is completely irregular and makes no sense. Thanks in advance. Edited by a3 on 18 October 2011 at 10:27am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| DNB Bilingual Triglot Groupie Finland Joined 4886 days ago 47 posts - 80 votes Speaks: Finnish*, Estonian*, English | Message 5 of 6 18 October 2011 at 11:08am | IP Logged | |||||
Even though I'm a native, I'm not an expert on Finnish grammar. However, here are some noun cases and how they are often contracted in colloquial speech, although some may vary by dialect. I come from a region where words are sometimes shortened so much that outsiders report misunderstandings. Anyways, Inessive (-ssa) vs. the colloquial(-s): I live in a house Standard: Minä asun talossa Colloquial: Mä asun talos (not that 'Mä' is a casual variation of 'Minä' Elative (-sta) vs. (-st) I came from (inside) a house Standard: Tulin talosta Colloquial: Tulin talost Basically, dropping the final vowel of the ending is common. Here is a table for the Finnish noun cases Finnish noun cases With the rest: genitive -n : This is the same in common speech, although in my area (Southwestern Finland) this is often dropped when spoken fast, leaving the noun in its original form. Most of the time it's preserved, though. adessive -lla ---> -l ablative -lta ---> -lt allative -lle ---> -l (Note that the allative and abessive are reduced in the same way. Usually the context clarifies which one it is. essive -na ---> -n (Basically the same as the standard genitive form, but will be understandable again from the context) translative -ksi ---> -ks instructive -n : This can be often replaced with -lla (or it's colloquial equivalent - l) in common speech. abessive -tta : Instead of saying 'talotta' (without a house), in common speech I usually hear 'ilman taloa' used more often, where 'ilman' implies 'without' more literally and the word 'talo' using the partitive instead of the abessive. comitative -ne- : Stays the same as far as I know. This kind of shortening is present in so many aspects of Finnish grammar that I don't have time to list them all, but hopefully you got the gist. 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Chung Diglot Senior Member Joined 7156 days ago 4228 posts - 8259 votes 20 sounds Speaks: English*, French Studies: Polish, Slovak, Uzbek, Turkish, Korean, Finnish | Message 6 of 6 18 October 2011 at 5:04pm | IP Logged | |||||
In addition to what DNB has posted, take a look at this article on Wikipedia and Spoken Finnish on Unilang. Another way for you to compare Colloquial and Standard Finnish would be to look at the the section in each chapter of FSI Conversational Finnish's textbook called "Sequence [insert number here]" and play the audio for the "Sequences" while reading their text. The dialogues there are juxtaposed as standard and colloquial, and so you can see the differences. 3 persons have voted this message useful |
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