Merry Christmas!

Christmas is called joulu in Finnish (derived from Yule), and as in the rest of the western world occurs in December - joulukuu (literally yule-moon). As there is usually snow (lunta) in Finland at Christmas, they don't wish for a white Christmas. Instead they hope that they won't have a black Christmas (musta joulu).

When you wish someone a merry Christmas, you say hyvää joulua - "good Christmas"! The phrase is in the partive, hence the ä and a on the ends of the words.

In Finland the presents (lahjat) are opened on Christmas Eve. Santa Clause (joulupukki - yule goat) travels down from Rovaniemi, and knocks on the door to deliver the gifts.

Another more serious Finnish tradition is to visit the cemetary (hautamaa) to place a candle (kyntillä) on the graves of deceased relatives.

To be able to

There are two verbs in Finnish that mean "to be able to" - osata and voida. Osata means to have the knowledge to allow you to do something (for example tie your shoelaces), and voida means to have the power to do something (for example lift a certain weight). Here is how you conjugate them:

minä osaan
sinä osaat
hän osaa
me osaamme
te osaatte
he osaavat

minä voin
sinä voit
hän voi
me voimme
te voitte
he voivat

Vocab list - autumn

We are well into autumn here in Finland, and the forest is full of mushrooms. Collecting and preparing wild mushrooms is a popular pastime in Finland, so here are some useful words:

syksy - autumn
sieni - mushroom
kantarelli - chanterelle mushroom (a yellow mushroom with a delicate almost apricot-like flavour)
herkutatti - cep, or porcini mushroom (a large nutty flavoured mushroom that looks like a bread roll on a thick stalk)
suppilovahvero - yellowfoot mushroom (similar to the chanterelle, but thinner and not as flavourful)
korvasieni - false morel (a weird fungus that looks like a twisted brown turban-like growth)
rousku - milk cap mushroom (flat mushrooms that exude a milk-like substance when cut)

These lead to an interesting verb in Finnish, and one that I think is unique to the language:

ryöpätä - to boil mushrooms in order to make them edible.

The korvasieni and many of the rousku contain poisons that are rendered inert by boiling and throwing the water away, and so the Finns have a specific verb that means this. In fact, Finland is the only country in the EU that is allowed to prepare these poisonous mushrooms for public consumption and sale (mainly because there would be no way of stopping the Finns - it's part of their culture).

The Elative case

The elative case is the "from" or "out of" case and is formed by adding -sta or -stä to the end of a word. You use it to say where you are from - for example

Olen Helsingistä - I am from Helsinki
Hän on Englannista - He/she is from England
Menet talosta - You come from the house
Se on tietokoneesta - It is from the computer

There are a few things to note:
1) the "k" in Helsinki turns into a "g" when you add a suffix to it. This is one of the consonant gradation rules that I allude to now and again. It's the same for other words ending in -nki. For example Finnish for town is kaupunki, so "I am from a town" is olen kaupungista.
2) Finnish for England is Englanti, but the "t" changes to an "n" when the suffix is added. This is another consonant gradation rule.
3) The word for computer is tietokone - from tieto, which means "information" and kone, which means "machine". An extra -e- is added; this is known as reverse consonant gradation.

So, this started as a post about the elative case, and turned into an introduction about gradation instead. In fairness, the elative case is simple and it's only gradation that makes it complicated.

So now, if you look back at the previous post, you should understand why the word mistä means "from where". It's like the word mitä (what) in the elative case - literally "from out of what":

mistä sinä tulet? - from out of what you come?
tulen Cambridgista. - I come from out of Cambridge

What? Where? Why?

Time for some very useful words, all beginning with the letter M. The first is mitä, which means "what". However, it's what in an indefinite sense - if you didn't hear what someone said, or if you're asking what is going on you use mitä. For example, the verb for "to happen" is tapahtua, so "what's happening" is mitä tapahtuu.

The word for "what" refering to something tangible is mikä. So if you're holding up a strange object in a Finnish shop and asking what it is, you would say mikä se on - "what is it".

Missä means "where". If you want to say "where are you", use missä olet.

Mistä means "from where" - with the verb tulla (to come) you can ask the question "where do you come from", namely mistä sinä tulet.

And finally, miksi means "why". If you have a small child who speaks Finnish you'll hear this word a lot, in which case it's useful to know the word koska - which means "because".

Counting

It's time to learn to count in Finnish. The words for Finnish numbers are very different from the ones in other European languages, and unlike English, the Finnish number system is a true decimal system. The only one that seems to have a link to English is the word for zero, or null - nolla. Here are the rest:

yksi - one
kaksi - two
kolme - three
neljä - four
viisi - five
kuusi - six (it also means fir tree, strangely enough)
seitsemän - seven
kahdeksan - eight
yhdeksän - nine
kymmenen - ten

To get eleven, twelve, thirteen and so on, add the word toistä to the number - yksitoistä, kaksitoistä, kolmetoistä...

The partive¹ for ten, kymmenä, is added after each number to make twenty, thirty, forty, and so on: twenty is kaksikymmentä, and thirty is kolmekymmentä, for example. And twenty-one is kaksikymmentäyksi.

We'll stop in the hundreds - one hundred is sata, and one hundred and one is satayksi. So one hundred and ninety nine would be sataykdeksänkymmentäyhdeksän.

You'll notice that numbers get rather long. The Finns have noticed this too, so it's rare for them to use the full name for each number. Instead, when counting a Finn would say, "Yks, kaks, kol, nel, viis, kuus", dropping the endings of the numbers. After all, they're patient, but not that patient.

Midsummer

The most important festival in Finland after Christmas is the midsummer festival, which is called juhannus. The Finns decamp en masse to the countryside, typically to their mökki, a summer cabin in the forest, often by a lake. Juhannus is spent cooking food on the barbecue, taking a dip in a lake and having sauna. The kokko, or bonfire, is lit at midnight on midsummer. Sometimes some of the single women present will head off to find seven different types of wild flower - these are placed under the pillow, and supposedly the woman will then dream of her future husband.

In the sauna the most important thing is löyly - the steam that carries the heat from the stove stones to the sauna bathers. However, the word is also used to describe the feeling or spirit of the sauna. The stove is called a kiuas, and the highest bench you sit on is the laude. All these terms apply only to the sauna, and are really only rough translations.

Finally, if you want to cause an argument in a sauna, ask for the name of the birch switches that sauna bathers use to (gently) beat the back, arms and legs, to improve blood circulation and gain benefit from the antiseptic properties of the birch leaf sap on them. Some Finns call them vihta, and others call them vasta. You can almost guarantee you'll have at least one from each camp in the sauna with you and they will spend then next hour or so violently disagreeing which is the correct name.

What do you do?

In Finnish there is a very easy way to make a word which means "professional who does X" - take the verb "to X", and then: if the verb ends in -aa remove one "a" and add -ja, whereas if the verb ends in -a then add -aja. So, for example:

matkustaa - to travel
matkustaja - traveller, passenger

ohjata - to steer, pilot, or direct
ohjaaja - director (especially a film director)

There's an extra rule in the case above: if the verb ends in -ta, remove it and add -aja. At some point in the future we'll look at the different kinds of verb endings there are, how to construct the root from them, and then this will all make a bit more sense. In the meantime, here are some more professions:

hoitaa - to take care off
hoitaja - nurse

kirja - a book
kirjaaja - clerk, or registrar

That last one was constructed from a noun, not a verb! Finnish may be a very logical and consistent language, but even it has it's quirks. Fortunately even the exceptions can sometimes be logical.

So here is a simple short test: the verb for "to drive" is ajaa. So what is the Finnish word for a driver?

(Answer: ajaja)

Vocab list - the seasons

The Finnish word for the seasons is vuodenaika. Aika means 'time', and vuoden means 'of the year'. It's the word vuosi (year) in the genitive case, and due to consonant gradation the 's' in vuosi becomes a 'd' (we're going to have to formally handle this consonant gradation issue sometime soon - it's getting unavoidable). Anyway, back to the issue at hand:

Finland, like England, has four main seasons.

kevät - spring
kesä - summer (an old word for summer is suvi - it's now also common as a girl's name)
syksy - autumn
talvi - winter

However, there are two other periods that have their own names, and are considered sort-of seasons:

kelirikko - season when frost and thaw damages the road and it becomes impossible to drive to your cottage in the forest; a few weeks between winter and spring.
ruska - the few weeks between summer and autumn when the leaves change colour.

Ruska is worth experiencing. Kelirikko isn't...

Aakkoset

The Finnish word for alphabet is aakkoset, which is the plural of the word aakkonen - letter, or alphabetic character. However, whereas we have 26 letters in the English alphabet, the Finns have 29 letters in theirs. They have three extra characters:

å/Å (which is called ruotsalainen å - the Swedish A)
ä/Ä
ö/Ö

You'll actually find keys for these three letters on the right-hand side of a Finnish keyboard. And this reveals an important fact about Finnish letters - the umlaut is not a diacritial modifier to the underlying letter. It is considered to be an entirely separate letter. So to a Finn ä is as different from a as, say, y is from u. As a result a Finnish dictionary (suomelainen sanakirja) has three extra chapters at the end, for words beginning with å, ä, and ö.

This can cause problems for English speakers, because in England there is no distinction between the ä sound in 'cat' and the a sound in 'car' (if you imagine 'cat' and 'car' pronounced in a BBC news presenter accent). But if you pronounce älä (don't) as ala, a Finn will hear you saying 'area' or 'space'. To them these two words do not sound similar at all.

And no matter how long you argue with them that they are pretty close together, and surely the context makes it clear that you meant "don't" and not "area", you'll never get a Finn to agree - not even grudgingly.

First Small Test

Here's a test for you: the Finnish word for nose is nenä. Using the essive case and the first person posessive ending, can you produce the word that in Finnish means "as my nose"?

Answer: Counting A as 1, B as 2, and so on, the answer is 14,5,14,27,14,27,14,9

Vocab list - the family

Here are some words concerning family:

perhe - family
isä - father
äiti - mother
sisko - sister
veli - brother
täti - aunt
setä - uncle
tytär - daughter
poika - son (also boy)

Interestingly, you put the words for aunt and uncle after the person's name, so Uncle Tomi would be Tomi-setä, for example.

The Adessive Case

By now you've probably forgotten the names of the other cases we've studied so far, but don't worry - you don't really need to know what they are called, just how they are formed and what they mean. So lets press on with a new case: the adessive, or "on" case. If you want to say something is on somewhere, you add -lla or -llä to the end of the word. So, for example:

lattia - the floor
lattialla - on the floor

pöytä - the table
pöydällä - on the table

katu - the street
kadulla - on the street (although in English you would say "in the street")

Those last two emphasises a second thing - when adding a case ending a single letter t changes to a d. This is known as one of the consonant gradation rules, which we'll be dealing with later.

The adessive case doesn't just mean "on" though, it can mean "with the aid of" or "using". For example:

kynä - a pen
kynällä - with a pen

kone - machine
koneella - with a machine

Incidentally, a major Finnish manufacturer and exporter of elevators and escalators is called Kone - keep an eye out in shopping centers and offices and you might see some of their products in use...

Vocab list - the forest

The forest is a big part of Finland - about 70% in fact. Here is a list of words to do with the forest and what you can find in it:

metsä - forest
puu - tree
sieni - mushroom
karhu - bear
peura - deer
poro - reindeer
ilves - lynx
suo - swamp
järvi - lake
lampi - pond/small lake
joki - river

Vocab list - confusable words

Here is a list of a couple of similar sounding words that I often mix up, and the techniques I use to keep them apart:

suola - salt
suoli - guts, intestines

A popular Finnish snack is pickled gherkins, which are called suolakurkku, or salt-cucumbers. You don't want to call them intestine-cucumbers. So I make a mental note that salt contains the letter a, as does the Finnish word suola.

vähän - a little
vanha - old

If you wanted to say "a little more", like Oliver Twist, you would ask for vähän lisää, so it's a useful word. As for not accidentally asking for "old more" - I have a friend who has an old van, so it's the word starting with "van" that means old. It's not a particularly sophisticated mnemonic, but it works for me.

The Genitive Case

In English we can indicate possession in two ways - using the word "of" or putting an apostrophe-s on the end of the possessor. So for example we say, "the Gulf of Finland" or "Peter's book". Deciding which to use is easy for a native English speaker. There are even situation when either works - you can say "the roof of the house" or "the house's roof".

So in English we can modify a noun to indicate possession, which means it is a case. In fact, it's called the Genitive Case.

In Finnish the genitive case is made by adding an -n to the end of the noun:

talo - house
talon - of the house, for example talon katto - the house's roof, or the roof of the house

Leena - popular Finnish woman's name
Leenan - Leena's, for example Leenan auto - Leena's car.

suomi kieli - the Finnish language
suomen kielen - of the Finnish language, for example suomen kielen fonetiikka - the phonetics of the Finnish language

Note that in the last example, the i at the end of each word turned into an e. This is just something that happens to words ending in i that are put in the genitive, and has to be learnt.

The Inessive Case

Back in August we covered the Essive Case, or as I like to call it, the "As" case. You simply stuck an -na or -nä on the end of a noun, which modified it to mean "as a noun".

Another common case is the Inessive Case, or as I like to call it, the "In" case. You stick an -ssa or -ssä on the end of a noun, which modifies it to mean "in a noun". Finnish doesn't have a separate word for "in" - they use the Inessive Case instead. So, for example:

talo - house
talossa - in the/a house

pää - head
päässä - in the/a head

kaapi - cupboard
kaapissa - in a/the cupboard

laatikko - box
laatikossa - in the/a box

Ah, in that last one we lost a k. When you stick new endings on words that end in double-k followed by a vowel, you remove one of the k's. It's called consonant gradation, and I'm going to avoid talking about it for quite a while yet, because it's one of the more difficult (some would say annoying) "features" of Finnish.