karlsson f finnish a comprehensive grammar

The book moves from the sound system through morphology and word classes to a detailed analysis of sentence structures and semantic features.Key features include: • particular focus on e

A Comprehensive Grammar

Finnish: A Comprehensive Grammar presents a fresh, accessible and

thorough description of the language, concentrating on the real patterns of use in modern Finnish

The book moves from the sound system through morphology and word classes to a detailed analysis of sentence structures and semantic features.Key features include:

• particular focus on examples from spoken Finnish reflecting current usage

• grammatical phenomena classified as common or rare

• appendices identifying stems and sequences of endings

• English-Finnish contrasts highlighted throughout

Finnish: A Comprehensive Grammar is an essential reference for the

inter-mediate and advanced learner and user of Finnish

Fred Karlsson is Adjunct Professor of Finnish at the University of Helsinki,

Finland

Routledge Comprehensive Grammars

Comprehensive Grammars are available for the following languages:Bengali

A Comprehensive Grammar

Fred Karlsson

First published 2018

by Routledge

2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN

and by Routledge

711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

© 2018 Edix, Inc.

The right of Fred Karlsson to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copy- right, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced

or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording,

or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or

registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Karlsson, Fred, author.

Title: Finnish : a comprehensive grammar / Fred Karlsson.

Description: Abingdon, Oxon ; New York : Routledge, 2017 |

Series: Routledge comprehensive grammars | Includes index

Identifiers: LCCN 2017014269 (print) | LCCN 2017016553 (ebook) | ISBN 9781315743547 (E-book) | ISBN 9781138821033 (hardback : alk paper) | ISBN 9781138821040 (pbk : alk paper)

Subjects: LCSH: Finnish language—Grammar.

Classification: LCC PH135 (ebook) | LCC PH135 K34 2017 (print) | DDC 494/.54182421—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017014269

Preface xiii

1.1 The relation of Finnish to other languages 1

2.6 Rhythm, word stress patterns and intonation patterns 23

2.6.3 Intonation patterns and accentuation 26

2.8 Major dialectal differences in pronunciation 31

3.1 Nominals and their inflectional endings 34

3.3 Non-finite verb forms and their endings 45

Contents

4.1.6 The most common words with

5.1.1 Tunti nominals with short final -i 71

5.1.2 Talo nominals with short final -u, -o, -y, -ö 74

5.1.3 Kala nominals with short final -a 75

5.1.4 Isä nominals with short final -ä 785.1.5 Nominals with final diphthong or

5.2.4 Perhe nominals with short final ‑e 86

5.3 Nominals with a final consonant and separate

5.3.9 Adaptation of new borrowed nouns 96

6.3 Personal endings and agreement of person 110

Chapter 7 Interplay between Finnish morphology

7.3 Syntactic functions of phrases in clauses 117

7.4 Cases and adpositional phrases are markers

8.2.2 Agreement within the noun phrase 125

8.2.4 Complexity of the noun phrase 129

9.2 Clauses with basic order subject + verb 142

9.7.1 Questions with -kO (‘yes-no’ questions) 1539.7.2 Question-word questions (‘wh-’ questions) 1569.8 Minimal examples of simple clause types 158

10.2 Complex sentences with subordinate clauses 16310.3 Complex sentences with infinitive and

10.5 Repeated embedding of subordinate clauses, non-finite phrases and nominalizations 169

11.2.1 The nominative marking subjects, objects

11.2.2 Special uses of the nominative 180

Chapter 13 The genitive case and total objects 202

13.3.1 Total object and partitive object 211

13.4 Quantity adverbials taking object cases 218

14.2 Possessive endings in other parts of speech 226

14.3 Ways of expressing ownership (possession) 227

17.1.1 Inflection of cardinal numbers 266

20.5 Other means for expressing modality 325

23.8 Verb unions with participles or infinitives 382

xii

26.2.4 Deriving verbs from nominals 432

Appendix 3: Material for studying Finnish as a

Index 497

Routledge published Finnish: An Essential Grammar in 1999, and it was

reprinted with minor revisions several times Its third edition appeared in 2015

Finnish: A Comprehensive Grammar builds upon the Essential Grammar,

with considerable expansion of all central aspects of Finnish: phonology, morphology (inflection and word formation), syntax and vocabulary Lots

of examples have been added, and overall the vocabulary has been updated

to the level of 2017

Even if the basis of this Comprehensive Grammar is the officially tioned normative written Finnish, full consideration is paid to spoken col-loquial Finnish, which is far too often neglected in grammars and textbooks intended for foreigners The colloquial pronunciation alternatives occur

sanc-within square brackets and are prefixed by a star ‘*’, for example Täällä on pien-i-ä laps-i-a [*tääl on pienii lapsii] ‘There are small children here’ Of

course there is much more variation in actual speech than can be strated here

demon-Throughout, the example sentences are segmented into their morphological parts to facilitate interpretation and, above all, to develop a sense in the student

of how to break up the long Finnish words into meaningful components Take

the example sentence Suunnitel>ma-ni [viettä‑ä viiko-n=loppu tv:n ääre-ssä]

kari>utu-i ‘My plan to spend the weekend in front of the TV foundered’ The segmentation provides the information that Suunnitel>ma-ni is derived from the (verb) stem suunnitel- by the derivational (>) ending >ma, and that

it contains the inflectional (possessive) ending -ni Within the brackets [ .] there is an infinitive phrase containing i.a the compound noun viiko-n=loppu

‘weekend’, where ‘=’ shows the border between the components The final

verb kari>utu-i is the past tense (-i) of the reflexive verb kari>utu-, derived from the noun kari ‘rock’.

Preface

xiv

Appendix 1 presents a scheme designed to help the student interpret the morphological structure of any Finnish word form, both from the begin-ning and from the end of the word

I have tried to formulate the grammatical rules as precisely as possible using reasonable linguistic terminology At the same time, all essentials should

be easy to infer from the numerous examples Appendix 2 contains brief definitions of all central terms used, with examples

The phenomenon of consonant gradation confounds the understanding of Finnish morphology, especially the understanding of how different stems

of the same word relate to one another To facilitate grasping the nature of

gradation, all weak grades will be marked by a prefixed ‘+’, e.g +sade ‘rain’ : satee-ssa ‘in the rain’.

The conceptual apparatus and terminology as concerns infinitives,

partici-ples and grammatical objects closely follow the Iso suomen kielioppi (Big Finnish Grammar, Hakulinen et al 2004), which has been an important

source in many other respects as well

Information on relevant digital and language-technological materials is available at: www.ling.helsinki.fi/~fkarlsso/finnish_materials.html

My sincere thanks are due to the Department of Foreign Languages, versity of Helsinki, for providing the infrastructure necessary for this book

Uni-to come about

As always: thank you, Sylvi!

Fred KarlssonHelsinki, 22 March 2017

A abbreviation for the vowels a and ä alternating in vowel

harmony

C abbreviation for any consonant

O abbreviation for the vowels o and ö alternating in vowel

ː phonetically long, e.g muuttaa [muːtːaː] ‘(to) move’ (NB:

not equal to the colon)

ˈ (superscripted) the following syllable carries primary stress,

e.g [ˈtɑlosːɑːn] ‘in his/her house’

ˌ (subscripted) the following syllable carries secondary

stress, e.g [ˈuskoˌmɑtːomɑn] ‘unbelievable’ (gen sg.)

[*x] x is a casual everyday pronunciation, e.g -ssA [*s] means

that the casual pronunciation of the inessive singular case ending -ssA is [s]

+ weak grade in consonant gradation, e.g takki ‘coat’ :

+taki-ssa ‘in a/the coat’

= internal word boundary in compound words, e.g

rau-ta=tie=asema ‘railway station’

a ≠ b a and b have different meanings, e.g lehti ‘leaf’ ≠ lähti ‘left’

~ alternative forms or examples, e.g -ssa ~ -ssä (inessive

end-ings); Ost-i-n kirja-n ~ kirja-t ‘I bought a/the book ~ the

books’

a > b the word b is morphologically derived from the word or

stem a, e.g opetta- ‘to teach’ > opet>us ‘teaching’.

: (colon) structural relation between different stems, forms

Notational conventions

and abbreviations

hand’; onne>ttom-i-a:ssa:sta:in:lla:lta:lle:na:ksi means that all of the endings -a, -ssa, -sta, -ksi attach to the stem onne>ttom-i- to form words such as onne>ttom-i-a, onne>ttom-i-ssa, onne>ttom-i-sta, onne>ttom-i-ksi as part of the inflectional paradigm of the word +onne>ton

‘unhappy’ (especially in Chapters 5, 6)

– hyphen, indicates boundary between stem and/or

inflec-tional endings, e.g käde-ssä-ni-kö ‘in my hand?’

‘ ’ a pair of single quotation marks encloses English glosses,

e.g käde -ssä-ni ‘in my hand’

( .) indicates optionality, e.g in the noun phrase (vanha) auto

‘(old) car’

/ the solidus indicates alternatives in glosses, e.g auto ‘a/the

car’, +Nä-i-n häne-t ‘I saw her/him’

-n a prefixed hyphen marks an inflectional ending or clitic,

e.g -n, -ni, -kin käte- a final hyphen indicates a stem requiring an ending

! an exclamation mark indicates emphasis, e.g talo-ssa-han!

A adjective

abess abessive case

ablat ablative case

acc accusative case

adess adessive case

adv adverb

advl adverbial

AdvP adverb phrase

allat allative case

cond conditional mood (in verbs)

elat elative case

emph emphatic, emphasis

ess essive case

fun function

gen genitive case

grad gradation

illat illative case

imp imperative mood (in verbs)

InfP infinitive phrase

indic indicative mood (in verbs)

iness inessive case

inf infinitive (in verbs)

infl inflection

instr instructive case

intrans intransitive verb

NumP numeral phraseobj object

p person, personalpart partitive casepass passive ending (in verbs)pcp participle

PcpP participle phrasepers person, personal

pl plural numberpl1 first person pluralpl2 second person pluralpl3 third person plural

PM postmodifierposs possessivePostP postpositional phrasepot potential mood (in verbs)PrepP prepositional phrasepres present tense (in verbs)pron pronoun

S subjectsect section

sg singular numbersg1 first person singularsg2 second person singularsg3 third person singularsg3pl3 third person singular or plural

sg singular numbersth somethingtns tensetrans transitive verbtransl translative case

Chapter 1

Introduction

• The relation of Finnish to other languages

• Finnish and Finland, past and present

• 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, French, 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 and Sweden and the far north-west of

Russia The term Lappish is derogatory The Sámi languages spoken in

Fin-land are North Sámi, Inari Sámi and Skolt Sámi, with some 1,800 speakers altogether

The languages most closely related to Finnish are Estonian, Karelian, Ingrian, Vepsian and Votian, 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 vocab-ulary, so closely related, that after some practice Finns and Estonians can understand each other’s languages especially when they are spoken slowly

If we group together the other traditionally acknowledged Finno-Ugric guages according to their relations to each other and to Finnish, we have the following picture:

1

Introduction The Finno-Ugric languages

Baltic-FinnicFinnish Estonian Sámi Mordvin Komi Khanty

VepsianVotian

→ → → → → increasing distance from Finnish → → → → →

Finnish and Hungarian are thus quite distant from each other, and the relation between these two languages can 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 The number of speakers of Uralic languages varies considerably Six Uralic languages have more than 500,000 speakers: Hungarian (14–15 million), Finnish (5.5 million), Estonian (1 million), Mordvin (800,000), Mari (500,000) and Udmurt (500,000) Komi has 350,000 and Karelian 35,000 speakers Several Uralic languages have very few speakers, and their future

is gravely endangered This is true of all four remaining Samoyed guages (30,000), and of Khanty (10,000), Mansi (900), the ten Sámi lan-guages spoken in the Nordic countries (60,000), Ingrian (300), Vepsian (4,000) and Votian (20)

lan-Since 2010 Meänkieli (30,000), often considered a northern dialect of Finnish, is acknowledged as a national minority language in the north-ern Swedish province of Tornedalen Likewise, from 2010 finnish is acknowledged as a national minority language in certain areas of Swe-den Since 1997 Kven (5,000), an old dialect of northern Finnish, is a minority language in the northern Norwegian provinces of Tromsø and Finnmark

Introduction

1.2 Finnish and Finland, past and present

In early 2017 the size of Finland’s population was 5.5 million people

Finn-ish is the native language of 4.9 million people, 88.7 per cent of the

popu-lation There is a group of 290,000 Swedish-speaking Finns (5.3 per cent),

who are guaranteed the same basic language rights as the Finnish-speaking

majority by the country’s constitution, about 1,800 Sámi-speaking

peo-ple, 10,000 Roma people (of whom some speak Romany; the language

is gravely endangered), about 5,000 people using Finnish sign language

as their first language and about a thousand Tatars (800 speakers at

var-ious levels of proficiency) More recent language minorities are Russian

(725,000), Estonian (49,000), English (19,000), Somali (19,000) and

Ara-bic (22,000) Some 500 languages were spoken in Finland at the end of

2016 by some 354,000 persons

Finland is officially a bilingual country, whose national (i.e official)

lan-guages are Finnish and Swedish Waves of emigration have resulted in

large Finnish-speaking minorities, particularly in North America (both

the United States and Canada) and in Sweden In Sweden today there are

approximately 300,000 to 450,000 speakers of Finnish (at various levels

of proficiency), i.e about the same number as there are Swedish-speaking

Finns in Finland Because Finnish is an officially recognized minority

lan-guage in Sweden with its own norm-issuing authorities, Finnish as a whole

is a pluricentric language, i.e a language with official status in more

than one country

The earliest archaeological remains unearthed in Finland are from 8500 bc,

left by unknown early inhabitants There were some early Indo-European

settlements in Finland when the first Finno-Ugric settlers arrived from the

east around 2000 bc This population incorporated Baltic and Germanic

elements during the last pre-Christian millennium The population thus

formed then absorbed the Baltic Finns from across the Gulf of Finland

about 2,000 years ago Politically, Finland was an integral part of Sweden

from around 1200 until 1809, and an autonomous Grand Duchy within

Russia from 1809 to 1917 Finland has been an independent republic since

6 December 1917 and a member of the European Union since 1995

During the Swedish period, Finnish was very much a secondary language

in official contexts Its basic public use was in church services and to some

extent in law enforcement The language of the administration and the

intel-ligentsia was Swedish It was not until 1863 that Finnish was decreed (not

lan-The earliest actual texts in Finnish date from the 1540s lan-The father of ten Finnish is considered to be Mikael Agricola (1510?–1557), the Bishop

writ-of Turku (Swedish: Åbo), who started the Finnish translation writ-of parts writ-of the Bible during the Reformation Some 5,350 of the words used by Agricola are still used in contemporary Finnish

Finnish was influenced by Swedish for a long time, especially as regards its vocabulary, which was quite natural, considering that the authorities generally spoke Swedish Since Turku (Åbo) was the capital city until

1812, it is understandable that Standard Finnish developed primarily out of south-west dialects In the nineteenth century there was increas-ing influence from eastern Finland, mostly owing to the national epic

Kalevala, the first edition of which was published in 1835 The Kalevala

is based on the folk poetry of eastern Finland and Karelia, as collected, compiled and finished by Elias Lönnrot (1802–1884) and others The

Kalevala was an important source of inspiration for the

nineteenth-cen-tury nationalist movement, whose central figure was Johan Vilhelm man (1806–1881)

Snell-The nationalist movement also had a variety of fundamental linguistic effects Many language scholars wanted to ‘finnicize’ Finnish by getting rid

of Swedish loanwords and a number of grammatical structures borrowed directly from Swedish

Language is not a uniform system: it varies in different ways, for example

in regional and social dialects The main split in colloquial spoken Finnish

is that between western and eastern regional dialects, mainly differing in pronunciation

In the latter half of the twentieth century this traditional picture of lect areas was radically levelled by societal processes such as industrial-ization, urbanization, mass education, improved means of communication and transport However, this book does not deal with regional dialects and their differences Instead, we shall mostly be concerned with the official norm of the language, Standard Finnish, one important variant of which

dia-is normal written prose But even the standard language dia-is not completely uniform Its grammatical structures and (in spoken Standard Finnish) its

1

Introduction

pronunciation both vary depending on the speech situation, the

interlocu-tors and a number of other facinterlocu-tors The standard language spoken in

offi-cial or formal situations is grammatically fairly close to the written norm;

but colloquial spoken Finnish, the vernacular, differs in many ways from

more formal usage in both pronunciation and grammar The differences

between everyday colloquial Finnish and more formal Finnish are discussed

in more detail in Chapter 27, and demonstrated in practice in the

transcrip-tions of the example sentences along the line, as needed

1.3 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 (class of

sounds perceived to be the same) is always written with the same letter

The converse is also true: a given letter always corresponds to the same

phoneme

There are less than 100 monosyllabic words, but many of these are in

com-mon use Monosyllables include the pronouns mä (colloquial sg1, full form

minä), sä ‘you’ (colloquial sg2, full form sinä), se ‘it’, me ‘we’, te ‘you, pl2’,

he ~ ne ‘they’, tää ‘this, colloquial’ (full form tämä), toi ‘that’, colloquial

form of tuo ‘that one’; grammatical words such as ei ‘no’, ja ‘and’, vaan

‘but’, jos ‘if’, kun ‘when’, kuin ‘as, than’, siis ‘therefore’, vain ‘only’; and

a few dozen nominals with two vowels (either long vowels or diphthongs)

such as puu ‘tree’, muu ‘other’, suu ‘mouth’, luu ‘bone’, maa ‘land, soil,

country’, työ ‘work’, tie ‘road’, yö ‘night’; and some handfuls of verbs such

as saa- ‘get’, tuo- ‘bring, import’, vie- ‘export, take away’, lyö- ‘hit’, syö-

‘eat’, juo- ‘drink’, ui- ‘swim’.

The vast majority of Finnish words contain two or more syllables: around

35,000 of the simple (non-compounded) words in the authoritative Finnish

dictionary Kielitoimiston sanakirja.

The basic principle of word formation in Finnish morphology (word

struc-ture) is the addition of endings (bound morphemes, more specifically suf

-fixes) 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.)

1

Introduction

auto-ssa-kin in a/the car too (car-in-too)

auto-i-ssa-kin in (the) cars too (car-s-in-too)

kin

auto-i-ssa-si-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-han I do say (say-I-emphasis)

sano-i-n-han I did say (say-past-I-emphasis)The adding of endings to a stem is a morphological feature of many Euro-pean 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 post-

positions 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 the car’ Finnish has

about 15 cases; English nouns have only one morphologically marked case.The second difference is that Finnish sometimes uses endings where Indo-Eu-ropean languages generally have independent words This is also true of the

Finnish possessive suffixes, which correspond to possessive pronouns, e.g -ni

‘my’, -si ‘your’ (sg.), -mme ‘our’, cf kirja-ni ‘my book’, kirja-mme ‘our book’.

Another set of endings particular to Finnish is that of the clitics, which always occur in the final position after all other endings It is not easy to say exactly

1

Introduction

what the clitics mean; their function is often emphasis of some kind, similar to

that of intonation in some other languages The clitics include -kin ‘too, also’,

-han ‘emphasis’ (often in the sense ‘you know, don’t you?’) and -ko

‘interrog-ative’, cf kirja-ssa-kin ‘in the book too’ and On-ko tuo kirja? ‘Is that a book?’

Another characteristic feature of Finnish morphology is the wide-ranging

use made of derivational endings in the formation of new independent

words The character ‘>’ is used for indicating the boundary between a

derivational ending and its stem Compare the basic word kirja ‘book’

with the derived forms kirj>e ‘letter’, kirja>sto ‘library’, kirja>llinen

‘literary’, kirja>llis>uus ‘literature’, kirjo>itta-a ‘(to) write’ and kirjo>-

itta>ja ‘writer’, in which each underlined element is a separate derivational

ending As the examples show, derived words may be further derived by

other derivational endings Derived words are often listed in dictionaries,

especially if their meaning is not a fully transparent combination of the

meanings of their parts Derivational endings are followed by inflectional

endings, for nouns case endings, possessive suffixes and clitics We can

then form such words as:

kirja>sto-ssa in a/the library

kirjo>ita-n-ko? Shall I write?

kirjo>itta>ja-n-kin of a/the writer, too

kirja>sto-sta-mme out of our library

Learning the endings is not as difficult as is often thought Since the endings

are often piled up one behind the other rather mechanically, Finnish word

forms are often easy to analyse if one knows the endings

Finnish nouns are like English ones but differ from those of many

Indo-Eu-ropean languages in that there is no grammatical gender In German there

is the der – die – das difference, French has le – la, Swedish en – ett and so

on, but these distinctions do not occur in Finnish

As for syntax (clause and sentence structure),1 Finnish does not have

arti-cles, either (cf ‘a car : the car’) The semantic function of artiarti-cles, to

distin-guish between definite and indefinite meaning, is often expressed by word

order in Finnish:

Kadu-lla on auto. There is a car in the street.

1

Introduction

Often this distinction is expressed by the cases nominative and genitive (sg.)/accusative, on the one hand, and partitive on the other, which have very important roles in Finnish syntax marking grammatical subjects, objects and predicate complements:

Kupi-ssa on kahvi-a. There is coffee (partitive case) in the cup.

Kahvi on kupi-ssa. The coffee (nominative case) is in the cup.

KUPI-SSA kahvi on! The coffee is in the CUP (emphatic)!

Nea jo-i kahvi-a. Nea drank coffee (partitive case).

Nea jo-i kahvi-n. Nea drank the coffee (genitive case).

Kahvi-n jo-i Nea. It was Nea who drank the coffee ~ The

coffee was drunk by Nea.

(Minä) nä-i-n häne‑t. I saw her/him (accusative case)

Hän näk-i minu‑t. She/he saw me (accusative case)

(Minä) kats>el-i-n hän‑tä I looked at him/her (partitive case)

As these examples show, word order variations and case marking are nected and have important functions in structuring the information flow and relative emphasis of the parts of a clause, corresponding also to some

con-of the tasks con-of the English passive construction

When adjectives occur as premodifiers of nouns, they agree in number and case with the headword, i.e they take the same endings

iso-ssa auto-ssa in a/the big car

iso-n auto-n of a/the big car

iso-i-ssa auto-i-ssa in (the) big cars

1.4 What are the special difficulties?

It is worth mentioning the areas of Finnish pronunciation, grammar and vocabulary which can cause most learning difficulty

1

Introduction

The most difficult feature of the pronunciation of Finnish is the significant

length (duration) of the sounds: differences of length (i.e short versus long)

very frequently serve to distinguish the meanings of words Compare pairs

such as:

muta-a mud (partitive case) muutta-a move (A infinitive)

Finnish has 16 diphthongs, i.e combinations of two vowels in the same

syllable Some of them can be difficult to pronounce, e.g tie ‘road’, tuo

‘that one’, työ [tyø] ‘work’ (noun), söi [søi] ‘ate’ (past tense), Väinämöinen

[væinæmøinen] (mythological man’s name from the national epic Kale‑

vala), käyttä-ä [kæytːæː] ‘(to) use’

Since Finnish is not an Indo-European language the basic vocabulary differs

from English Here are some of the most frequent words in Finnish:

voi-da can, (to) be able to sano-a (to) say

1

Introduction

It is immediately clear that learning Finnish words requires an effort The burden is lightened, however, by the fact that Finnish has thousands of direct loanwords (mostly from Swedish but also increasingly from English) and a great many translation loans, expressions that have been more or less directly translated into their Finnish equivalents

Examples of older identifiable loans are the following (both Swedish and English equivalents are given):

ankka anka, duck kahvi kaffe, coffee kakku kaka, cake kallo skalle, skull keppi käpp, cane kirahvi giraff, giraffe kirkko kyrka,

church

kruunu krona,

crown

pankki bank, bank

penkki bänk, bench posti post, mail sokki chock,

pro-‘to digitize’, fani ‘fan’, fiilis or fiilinki ‘feeling’, google>tta-a, googla>t-a

‘to google’, hipsteri ‘hipster’, hitti ‘hit’, iisi ‘easy’ (substandard), jeeppi

‘jeep’, juppi ‘yuppie’, kursori ‘cursor’, modeemi ‘modem’, moderaattori ~ moderoi>ja ‘moderator’, moderoi-da ‘to moderate’, netti ‘(Inter)net’, rokki

‘rock and roll’, pop=musiikki ‘pop music’, pubi ‘pub’, okei ‘okay’, romppu

‘CD-ROM (disc)’, stalkat-a ‘to stalk’ : stalkkaa-n, stalkkeri ‘stalker’, teippi

‘tape’, viski ‘whisky’.

English influences are also to be seen in many meaning extensions: hiiri means ‘mouse’, also in the sense of the device of a computer; verkko means

‘net’, also in the sense of Internet

Compound words which are translated loans include kirja=kauppa shop’, olut=pullo ‘bottle of beer’, rauta=tie=asema ‘railway station’, tie- do>sto=muoto ‘file format’, koti=sivu ‘home page’, varm>uus=kopio ‘safety copy’, korva=merkit-ä ‘(to) earmark’ (the character ‘=’ marks internal word

‘book-boundaries in compounds)

1

Introduction

Because Finnish has more endings at the end of the words than e.g English

has, Finnish words are notably longer than English words This difference is

amplified by the strong tendency of (especially written) Finnish to use long

compound nouns consisting of two or more members that are conjoined

as one uninterrupted string of letters The largest and most authoritative

monolingual Finnish dictionary, Kielitoimiston sanakirja (Finnish

dictio-nary compiled by the Language Bureau of the Institute of the Languages of

Finland),2 contains more than 100,000 words, out of which some 65,000

are compounds On average, the length of written English words is slightly

more than five letters, while the corresponding figure for Finnish is almost

seven letters

In section 1.3 it was said that the inflection of Finnish words is easy in that

the endings are often attached mechanically to the stem However, this is

not always true The form of the basic stem (root, lexical form) is often

altered when certain endings are added to it, i.e a lexical word may be

rep-resented by different stems depending upon which endings it is followed by

These changes are called morphophonological alternations Compare for

example the inflection of the noun käsi ‘hand’ in different cases.

käde-ssä in a/the hand (hand, inessive)

käte-en into a/the hand (hand, illative)

käs-i-ssä in (the) hands (hand-s-in, plural inessive)

käsi-kin a/the hand, too (hand, nominative)

käte-ni my hand (hand, nominative or genitive)

The basic form käsi takes different forms according to the following ending

and its sound structure These sound alternations are governed by rules that

can sometimes be complex Here are a few more example pairs:

1

Introduction

Case endings are usually added to nouns, adjectives, pronouns and als (all together called nominals), but they may also be added to verbs

numer-(Minä) lähde-n Jyväskylä-än. I’m going to Jyväskylä.

(Minä) lähde-n kävele-mä-än. I’m going for a walk (lit walking).

The verb form kävele-mä-än literally means ‘into walking’, just as lä-än means ‘into (the town of) Jyväskylä’ Both forms contain the illative case ending -än meaning ‘into’ When complex sentences are formed, Finn-

Jyväsky-ish makes more use than EnglJyväsky-ish of such inflected non-finite verb forms.The grammatical object in Finnish is marked by a case ending In the two

following sentences the endings -n, -t, -a indicate ‘this word is the object

of the sentence’ and tell something about its definiteness or indefiniteness

(Minä) osta-n kirja-n ~ kirja-t ~ kirjo-j-a.

I (shall) buy a/the book : the books : books

Tuomas näk-i auto-n ~ auto-t ~ auto-j-a.

Tuomas saw a/the car : the cars : cars

• Letters and sounds

• Vowels and consonants

• Short and long sounds

• Diphthongs

• Syllables

• Rhythm, word stress patterns and intonation patterns

• Vowel harmony

• Major dialectal differences in pronunciation

2.1 Letters and sounds

Disregarding words of foreign origin, Finnish has eight letters for vowels

and 13 for consonants: i e ä y ö u o a and p t k d g s h v j l r m n With few

exceptions the following important correspondence holds between letters and phonemes in carefully pronounced Standard Finnish (phonemes are sounds thought of as types, irrespective of slight variations in the speech of the same person or between different people)

Each letter corresponds to one and the same phoneme, and each phoneme corresponds to one and the same letter

Note the following pronunciation details in which precise phonetic values are indicated by characters from IPA, the precise character set of the Inter-national Phonetic Association:1

• The vowel corresponding to the letter ä is an open unrounded front

vowel [æ] (cf the short vowels in British English shall, rat).

• The vowel corresponding to the letter y is a close rounded front vowel

[y] (cf German über ‘over’).

• In genuine Finnish words the letter d occurs only in medial position,

Chapter 2

Pronunciation and

sound structure

kahdeksan ‘8’, yhdeksän ‘9’ In Standard Finnish such words are

pro-nounced with a [d], but in colloquial or dialectal Finnish the [d] might

be either omitted or rendered as [r] or [l]

• The vowel corresponding to the letter ö is a close–mid rounded front

vowel [ø] (cf German böse ‘evil’).

• The letter g does not occur in genuinely Finnish words, with one exception: the combination of letters ng is pronounced as a long

[ηː]-sound (a long palatovelar nasal consonant), e.g rengas [reηːɑs]

meaning ‘tyre’, rangais-ta [rɑηːɑistɑ] ‘to punish’.

• The letter n before a k is pronounced as a short [η]-sound, e.g Helsinki [helsiŋki] (cf English drink).

• When length of vowels and consonants is used to differentiate word meanings, short phonemes are written with one letter and long pho-

nemes with two, as in tuli ‘fire’ – tuuli ‘wind’ – tulli ‘customs’; kansa

‘people’ – kanssa ‘(together) with’; muta ‘mud’ (nominative case, meaning ‘mud’ or ‘the mud’) – muta-a ‘mud’ (partitive case, meaning

‘some mud’ or ‘an indefinite amount of mud’) Long phonemes are roughly twice as long as short ones

• Names of Swedish origin may contain the letter å (Å) as in Åbo (Finn Turku, place name), Åke (male name), Svartå (place name)

Words of foreign origin may contain other letters than those

mentioned previously, for example b c f g š w x z ž as in banaani

‘banana’, bussi ‘bus’, faarao ‘Pharaoh’, filosofia ‘philosophy’, geeni

‘gene’, geologia ‘geology’, šakki ‘chess’, Tšekki ‘Czech Republic’, maharadža ‘maharajah’.

• The consonant phonemes b f g š ž are not fully integrated into the

Finnish sound system In perfect Standard Finnish the words tioned in the previous paragraph would be pronounced respectively as

men-containing [b f g š z ž] in the appropriate positions, but in reality they are often pronounced [p v k s s ts], e.g [pɑnɑːni pusːi vilosofiɑ keːni keolokiɑ sɑkːi tsekːi mɑhɑrɑtsɑ] The letter š is often substandardly written with s, e.g šakki ~ sakki ‘chess’.

• It is fairly common but substandard for the short consonants p t

k s f to be pronounced long when occurring after l r m n or a long vowel, e.g appelsiini ‘appelssiini’, arkeologia ‘arkkeologia’, graafinen

‘graaffinen’, parlamentaarinen ‘parlamenttaarinen’, shampoo poo’, sinfonia ‘sinffonia’.

‘samp-• The alphabetical order of letters is a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s š t

u v w x y z ž å ä ö.

• Careful, ‘official’ pronunciation of Finnish is very close to the written standard which is phonetically mainly based on Häme dialects spoken especially in central-southern parts of Finland, around the city of

2

Pronunciation

and sound

structure

Tampere In contradistinction to English, Standard Finnish

orthogra-phy is therefore shallow For the relation between written and spoken

Standard Finnish the following old slogan is accurate: ‘Finnish is

pro-nounced as it is written’ For example, the Standard Finnish written

sentence Tule-t-ko sinä? ‘Are you coming?’ is pronounced [tuletko

sinæ], where the stem tule- means ‘come’, -t is the second person

singular (sg2) ending ‘you’, -ko is the ending meaning ‘question’ and

sinä is the sg2 personal pronoun ‘you’ Every letter is represented by

its corresponding phoneme in careful pronunciation

• The pronunciation of everyday spoken Finnish differs in several

respects from that of the standard spoken norm which nowadays is

not frequently heard in its full form (see Chapter 27) Many words in

colloquial spoken Finnish are shortened and contracted In the

subse-quent chapters casual everyday pronunciations will often be indicated

by expressions such as -ssa [*s], meaning that the full pronunciation

of the inessive case ending -ssa is [sːa] (in other words, the s is long),

and the casual pronunciation is [s] Likewise, a description such as

Tule-t-ko sinä? [*tuutsä ~ tuuksä] ‘Are you coming?’ means that the

full pronunciation of the sentence can be deduced from the written

form and is [tuletko sinæ] This particular sentence has two colloquial

pronunciations (indicated by the bracketed star [* .]), tuutsä and

tuuksä, phonetically [tuːtsæ] and [tuːksæ] Here many things have

happened in everyday speech: the stem tule- has been contracted

and assimilated to tuu-; either the question ending -ko or the sg2

ending -t has been omitted altogether (in tuuksä the question ending

is shortened to plain -k), and finally the sg2 pronoun sinä ‘you’ has

been shortened to sä In practice, the distinction between careful and

casual pronunciation is not a rigid one, a mixture of more or less

careful pronunciations of individual words may occur in the same

utterance Casual pronunciation is especially typical of the speech of

young people

2.2 Vowels and consonants

Finnish (apart from words of foreign origin) has eight vowels and 13

con-sonant phonemes: i e ä y ö u o a and p t k d s h v j l r m n ŋ All vowels

and almost all consonants can occur as either short or long sounds

(pho-nemes) The phonetic definitions of the Finnish vowels and consonants are

as follows, with International Phonetic Association (IPA) characters and

examples of near-equivalent British English sounds:

2

Pronunciation and sound structure

Letter IPA Phonetic definition English example

y y close front rounded

ö ø close-mid front rounded

p p unvoiced unaspirated bilabial

s s unvoiced alveolar sibilant sound

h h ɦ x ç glottal/palatovelar fricative or

glide

honey

v ʋ voiced labiodental glide voice

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Pronunciation

and sound

structure

Special attention should be paid to the following details.

• The major pronounciation challenges for a native speaker of English

relate to the front rounded vowels y ö, and to the distinction between

short and long phonemes

• The vowel y [y] is articulated with strongly protruded lips and a small

opening between them Finnish y [y] should not be confused with the

English letter <y> corresponding to the phonetic approximant [j], as in

the word ‘yes’

• The quality of the long vowel öö is [ø:] and that of the short ö is [ø],

cf sinä-kö? ‘you?’, pöllö ‘owl’, mörkö ‘goblin’, Närpiö-ön ‘to Närpiö’

(illative case) The lips are protruded and half-closed

• There is no difference in quality between the corresponding long and

short vowels ii – i, ee – e, ää – ä, yy – y, öö – ö, uu – u, oo – o, aa – a.

• All long vowels are pronounced as pure long vowels, not as if they

were diphthongs The length (phonetic duration) of a long vowel is

roughly twice that of a short one

• All vowels are pronounced with full vowel quality also in unstressed

positions of the word They are not reduced towards the neutral vowel

[ə], as frequently is the case in English for unstressed vowels

• The vowels ee and e, and also ää and ä, are differentiated (indicated

by the character ‘≠’) in all positions in a word, including before r and

in unstressed syllables Cf te ‘you’ ≠ tee ‘tea’, me-i-lle ‘to us’ ≠ me-i-llä

‘at us’ (= ‘at our house’), tee-llä ‘with tea’ ≠ täällä ‘here’, piste ‘point’

≠ pistä! ‘sting!’, venee-n ‘of the boat’ ≠ nenä-än ‘into a/the nose’, lehti

‘leaf’ ≠ läht-i ‘(she/he) left’, veri ‘blood’ ≠ väri ‘colour’, perkele ‘devil’,

merkki ‘mark’, Leevi (male name), väärä ‘wrong’.

• The consonants p t k are pronounced without aspiration, i.e without

a breathy ‘h’ sound after them

• The consonant s is often pronounced as a rather dark, thick sound

that can be close to š, especially in the environment of u Cf pussi

‘bag’, luu-ssa ‘in a/the bone’, sumu ‘fog’, myös ‘also’.

• The consonant h may occur between vowels and is then pronounced

weakly It can also co-occur with consonants, and is then a stronger

sound, particularly if the following consonant is t or k Cf huono

[huono] ‘bad’, miehe-n [mie ɦen] ‘of a/the man’, paha ‘evil’,

ihmi-nen ‘person’, varhain ‘early’, vanha ‘old’, vihko [viçko] ‘notebook’,

vihta [viçt ɑ] ‘bunch of birch twigs’, sähkö [sæhkø] ‘electricity’, tuhka

[tuxkɑ] ‘ash’

• The consonant l is pronounced as rather a thick sound (but not as thick

as English [ɫ], e.g in will) when it occurs between the vowels u and o

Cf pullo ‘bottle’, hullu ‘mad’, kulta ‘gold’, pala ‘bit’, villi ‘wild’.

• The consonant r is always trilled with the tip of the tongue, e.g

2

Pronunciation and sound structure

the stream’, kierrä-n ‘I turn’ A typical British or American r, i.e the

approximant [ɹ], sounds very un-Finnish as a substitute for the trilled Finnish [r]

• After certain grammatical forms the initial consonant of the following word or clitic lengthens These forms are mainly the second person

singular imperative, e.g tule! ‘come!’ (section 20.3); most nominals ending in -e in the nominative case, such as vene ‘boat’ (with an extended stem as in venee-ssä ‘in the boat’, section 5.2.4); the present indicative negative, e.g e -n tule ‘I am not coming’ (section 9.6); and the A infinitive, e.g tul-la ‘(to) come’ (section 22.2).

Examples:

pronunciation

Meaning

Imperative Mene pois meneppois Go away!

2 pers sg Ole hiljaa! olehhiljaa Be quiet!

Tule tänne! tulettänne Come here!

Nominative Vene tul-i. venettuli The boat came

liikemies liikemmies businessman

Pres indic

negative

E-n tule Turku-un.

entuletturkuun I’m not coming

to Turku

E-mme tule-kaan.

emmetulekkaan We’re not

coming after all

E-n ole sairas.

enolessairas I am not ill

A infinitive Halua-n ol-la

täällä.

haluanollattäällä I want to be

here

Halua-n lähte-ä pois.

The colloquial pronunciations of these expressions (where different) could

be: [*me(e)ppois, o(o)hhiljaa, tu(u)ttänne, entu(u)tturkuun, emmetu(u)-

kkaan, eno(o)ssairas, haluunollattäällä, haluunlähteeppois].

2.3 Short and long sounds

The difference between short and long sounds is used very widely in Finnish

to distinguish different words Long sounds can occur in almost any

posi-tion in a word, and there are few restricposi-tions on permissible combinaposi-tions

of long and short sounds This is clear from the following examples

Tule tänne! Come here!

Ulkona ei tuule Outside it is not windy.

Ulkona ei tuul-le.Outside it is probably not windy (an old-fashioned form)

Ulkona tuule-e Outside it is windy.

Elina tule-e. Elina comes.

Elina tul-le-e. Elina will probably come (an old-fashioned form)

Ulkona tuul-le-e Outside it is probably windy (an old-fashioned form)

Almost all variable combinations of short and long sounds occur, with the

force of distinguishing word meanings: short-short-short, short-long-short,

long-short-long, long-long-short, short-long-long, long-long-long, etc

Note in particular the following three points:

The difference between a short and a long vowel before either a

short or a long consonant creates a difference in meaning

Examples:

mutta but muutta-a (to) change muu-ta other (partitive case)

muna egg muu-na other (essive case) muunna! transform!

2

Pronunciation and sound structure

takka-a fireplace (partitive case)

taakka-a burden (partitive case)

There is a distinction between a short and a long p, t, k or s when it occurs after l, r, m, n or η Before a short p, t, k or s, the consonants l, r, m, n and

η are fairly long.

Examples:

and a short or half-long [n]-sound

The main stress is always on the first syllable of the word (section 2.6) Long vowels elsewhere than in the first syllable are pronounced without

main stress, cf talo-on [ˈtɑloːn] ‘into the house’, hyppää-n [ˈhypːæːn] ‘I jump’, kaappi-in [ˈkɑːpːiːn]‘into the cupboard’, ravintola-an [ˈrɑvintolɑːn]

‘into the restaurant’, talo-ssa-an [ˈtɑlosːɑːn] ‘in her/his house’, Helsingi-ssä

2

Pronunciation

and sound

structure

[ˈhelsiηːisːæ] ‘in Helsinki’ For speakers of English, the pronunciation of

long unstressed vowels is a special difficulty There are Finnish words with

many long vowels and consonants immediately following one another, such

as aatteellinen [ˈɑːtːeːlːinen] ‘ideological’, to be compared with aatelinen

[ˈɑːtelinen] ‘belonging to the nobility’, and ateelinen [ˈɑteːlinen] ‘atelic’, a

term in linguistic theory

As can be seen from the previous examples, distinctively long sounds are

always written with two identical letters This concerns both consonants

and vowels A distinctively long consonant is equivalent to a combination

of two different consonants (e.g tt and ts), and a distinctively long vowel is

equivalent to a diphthong (e.g ii, ai and ie).

2.4 Diphthongs

Finnish has 16 common diphthongs, i.e combinations of two vowels

occurring in the same syllable Diphthongs can be divided into four groups

according to the final vowel

2

Pronunciation and sound structure