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The home pages for the Usenet newsgroup soc.culture.nordic

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Finnish

• Pronunciation: Easy in the sense that it uses a small number of sounds which are subject to a surprisingly small amount of allophonic variation; difficult in the sense that the ability to speak and understand Finnish is crucially dependent on having learned to distinguish between long and short vowels and consonants, and learning to articulate unstressed syllables crisply without the slightest trace of slurring or reduction, this being the exact opposite of what an English speaker is likely to do.

  All Finnish words have their main stress on the first syllable, and the basic intonation patterns are easily learned.

• Grammar: First the good news: no grammatical gender, almost no irregular nouns or verbs, there is usually a simple one-to-one mapping relationship between ending and function or meaning.

  The bad news is an extremely complex set of morphophonemic alternations known as "consonant gradation" which results in most lexical morphemes having at least two highly divergent forms:

  varvas "toe",
  varpaat "the toes";

  käsi "hand, arm",
  kädet "the hands, the arms";

  joki "river",
  joet "the rivers";

  aikoa "to intend",
  aion "I intend",

  Although not as difficult as it appears at first glance, consonant gradation has to be mastered before even the simplest Finnish sentences can be constructed.

  Finnish has fifteen cases, an elaborate system of possessive suffixes, infinitives, participles, and enclitic particles. These allow for an economy of expression which allows complex ideas to be expressed in the form of a few long, morphologically complex words: Kirjoittauduttuamme hotelliin menimme kolmannessa kerroksessa sijaitsevaan huoneeseemme. "registered-after-having-our hotel-into went-we third-in floor-in situated-being-in room-into-our" = After having registered into the hotel we went to our room, which was on the third floor.

  The grammar of written, standard Finnish differs in many important respects from that of colloquial Finnish, for which reason the student has to learn two variants of the grammar:

  (Standard)
  "Eilen tapahtunut onnettomuus..."

  [yesterday happened accident]

  (Colloquial)
  "Onnettomuus, joka tapahtui eilen..."

  [accident which happened yesterday]

  Of particular interest in Finnish grammar is the manner in which the notion of definiteness is linked with the semantics of the verb and the case of the object:

  Luin kirjaa.

  "I was reading a book"
  [object in partitive case, indicates indefiniteness and/or lack of a result],

  Luin kirjan.

  "I read the book."
  [object in accustive case, indicates definiteness and/or a specific result.]

  Overall, you will find that Finnish grammar is quite complex, but it is also logical and consistent once you understand the underlying principles.

• Vocabulary: Finnish is a non-Indo-European language and thus has a vocabulary which, by definition, is unrelated to that of English. Surprisingly, though, Finnish and the languages from which it has evolved have been in contact with Indo-European languages for more than four thousand years. This means that Finnish has a surpringly large number of loanwords borrowed from present and erstwhile neighboring languages.

  These include words like

  • porsas "piglet" and sata "hundred" from some ancient Indo-Iranian langauge,
  • sisar "sister", tytär "daughter", hammas "tooth", and herne "pea" from ancient Baltic,
  • patja "matrass", tupa "living room", ruhtinas "prince", kuningas "king", kaunis "pretty", rikas "rich", leipä "bread", and ja "and" from various ancient Germanic languages,
  • vapaa "free", tuska "pain", määrä "amount" from Old Russian,
  • thousands of words such as sänky "bed", renki "farmhand", piika "servant girl", maanantai "Monday", tiistai "Tuesday", lauantai "Saturday", söötti "cute, sweet", mummo "grandmother", from older and contemporary dialectal and standard Swedish.

  Thus, more than might be expected, the Finnish vocabulary is a linguistic musueum containing many words in much the same form they were when borrowed thousands of years ago, e. g. patja "matrass" is almost identical with the reconstructed Proto-Germanic *badja(n), the progenitor of Modern English "bed", Swedish "bädd", etc.

  During the past century and a half Finnish has shown a strong tendency to favor derivation and calquing over borrowing. Thus

  • valo "light", valokuva "photograph" ["light picture"], valokuvaaja "photographer", valokuvata "to photograph", valokuvaus "photography";
  • kirja "book", kirjoittaa "to write", kirje "letter [epistle]", kirjain "letter [of the alphabet]", kirjasto "library", kirjallinen "written", kirjailija "author", kirjoittaja "writer";
  • taitaa "to possess a skill", taide "art", taiteilija "artist".

• Overall usefulness: Finnish opens the door to the culture and turbulent history of Finland and the surrounding areas. It is close enough to Estonian to allow easy acquisition of that language. Finland's recent accession to the European Union has resulted in a considerable demand for people fluent in it and other official Union languages; we can assume that the same will hold for Estonian in a few years time. On a more intellectual plane, Finnish is probably the most accessible non-Indo-European language for speakers of English, so it offers a unique opportunity to consider the manner in which human languages have evolved the strategies necessary for structuring their universe. Of particularl interest is the manner in which it has used its own resources to find equivalents for the concepts and terminology of Western European culture.

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