The Essive Case

In the last post we learnt the days of the week. This gives us an excellent opportunity to learn about Finnish cases. Cases are a tricky thing for you to get your head around as an English native speaker, because we only have two commonly used cases - one for when it's the subject (for example, "I"), and one for when it's the object ("I" becomes "me"). In Finnish instead of having modifiers like "on", "in", "from", "to", "as" and so on, you actually change the ending of the word.

Make any sense? Probably not. So lets plough on and learn about the essive case. This is described as indicating "a temporary state of being." In Finnish you put a word in the essive case by adding -na/nä (depending on vowel harmony). So, Finnish for child is lapsi, and if you wanted to say "as a child" you would say lapsena (argh, as an added complication the i at the end of lapsi becomes an e to "make it sound better").

So, back to our original point.The essive is also used to say that something happened or is going to happen on a specific day. So if you want to say "on Monday" you say maanantaina:

On Monday - maanantaina
On Tuesday - tiistaina
On Wednesday - keskiviikkona
On Thursday - torstaina
On Friday - perjantaina
On Saturday - lauantaina
On Sunday - sunnuntaina

Days of the week

If you're going to find your way around Finland you need to know which day it is, mainly because the opening times of the supermarkets vary bizarrely from day to day.

maanantai - Monday
tiistai - Tuesday
keskiviikko - Wednesday
torstai - Thursday
perjantai - Friday
lauantai - Saturday
sunnuntai - Sunday

Finnish for "day" is päivä. Note that the days aren't capitalised, unlike in English. Some of the days have familiar looking names, and some don't.