160 replies to this topic

[Juni Ori]

A. J. Raffles, on Apr 18 2006, 08:55 AM, said:

Hmm, sorry, but what cases are those? My guess would be they're all genitives, because of the 'n' at the end, but I'm not sure whether I'm trying to discover rules where there aren't any. Am I correct in assuming that the regular ending would be 'nen', and the irregular-seeming examples are because of historical changes (for example "teroittimen" would at one point have been something like "teroitinnen", but the consonants changed)?

Yes, I didn't underline it, but I was still speaking of genitives. Better bet would be saying that genitives are supposed to end in -n I believe... However, this is one of those places where I can't see the pattern, though I still speak the language perfectly. But you know what would be more than nasty thing to do now? Tell you the plural genitives to you!

(varkaiden, parhaiden, sydänten, teroittimien, pakkausten, rakkauksien, nälkäisten, ohuiden - same words... )

Oh, and few new ones:
veitsi - veitsen - veitsien (knife)
seitsemän - seitsemän - seitsemien (seven)

And the most important of course:
minä, minun - I / sinä, sinun - you / hän, hänen - he/she / me, meidän - we / te, teidän - you / he, heidän - they / tämä, tämän - this / tuo, tuon - that / se, sen - it / nämä, näiden - these / nuo, noiden - those / ne, niiden - they

[Juni Ori]

Sorry for double-post, but I just had to say I was waiting when does this get splitted from the language thread, which was split from..?

[Stebbi]

I can speak Finnish...

Heinz Chilikastikkeen korkean laadun taustalla ovat auringonkypsyttämättuoreet tomaatit. Tomaatit käsitellään herkulliseksi chillikaseksi 24 tunnin sisällä niiden poimimisesta.

Pff finnish is easy! =)

[Juni Ori]

Ahem... Perhaps you first check your grammar before mentioning anything about speaking it... Here's correct:

Quote

Heinz Chilikastikkeen korkean laadun taustalla ovat auringon kypsyttämät tuoreet tomaatit. Tomaatit käsitellään herkulliseksi chillikastikkeeksi 24 tunnin sisällä niiden poimimisesta.

But: Soon I'll be trying to educate AJ more about Finnish oddities, like word "työ" (plural "työt", genitive "työn", plural genitive "töiden", etc...)!

[BeefontheBone]

Is that something about Heinz baked beans, in tomato sauce?

[Juni Ori]

Whoops, I got one typo there that I missed in the original one! Chilli should be chili.

But same in english:

Quote

Behind the high quality Heinz Chilisauce are fresh tomatos ripen by sun. Tomatos are processed within 24h collecting.

Quite close, I think.

[Juni Ori]

Urgh... AJ, go ahead, ask something, I don't have any qualification to teach and very poor imagination doesn't help. So what would be useful and reasonable?

[A. J. Raffles]

Right, tell me something about noun classes, then. I know Finnish doesn't have any destinctions between grammatical genders (like Norwegian en/ei/et), but obviously there's different classes of nouns that work through different patterns - the forms you mentioned for työ don't apply to all nouns, and I doubt it's completely random; at the very least, there'll be groups of nouns that follow the same pattern, so what are the general rules for forming the different forms of nouns?
*waits for a horribly complicated explanation*

[Juni Ori]

I sincerely hope I understood right... I just don't know how to start. One question: what forms do you want to know?

I saw the evident in near future. Did I seriously ask her to ask something? Damn pride, I just should had let this thread die...

[A. J. Raffles]

Actually I don't so much want to know individual forms as the rules through which they're formed. For different nouns there are different ways of forming genitive/accusative/dative/whichever other cases Finnish might have and their respective plural forms, right? But they can't ALL be different, so what I'd like to know is which types of nouns work along similar lines (for example, do all bisyllabic nouns whose nominative singular ends in a vowel follow the same scheme as työ or are there other factors involved?) Yes, I know I'm being cruel, but I'd really like to know, actually...

[Juni Ori]

I guess it's AJ teaching me English, not me teaching her Finnish.

Umm... Okay, I'll try to clear it out. First in my head... I'll be editing this later.

Step 1) There are 15 cases in Finnish...

Step 2) Words ending with "-nen"
Singular: genitive "-sen"; adessive "-sellä"; ablative "-selta"; allative "-selle"; essive "-sena"; inessive "-sessä"; translative "-seksi"
Plural "-set": genitive "-sten"; adessive "-sillä"; ablative "-silta"; allative "-sille"; essive "-sina"; inessive "-sissä"; translative "-siksi"

There you go, seven cases. But my brain is melting...

Edited by Juni Ori, 21 April 2006 - 10:56 PM.

[A. J. Raffles]

I'm sorry. I'll just try if I can find a decent Finnish grammar book somewhere and stop bothering you, OK?

[Juni Ori]

Don't be, just don't expect too much!

[A. J. Raffles]

Well, considering my present knowledge of Finnish is nil, anything will be an improvement, really. I don't need to conquer the world quite so soon...

About those 15 cases: that sounds intimidating, obviously, but I assume it includes things like "Juninkaan" which would be expressed through an entire phrase in other, non-agglutinating languages?

[Juni Ori]

Umm... Now I quite didn't understand, how so "would be expressed through an entire phrase"?