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.

Possession

Finnish has a special way of modifying an object to show that it is owned or held by someone. There are the equivalents of the possessive subjects, or you can change the object:

mine - minun or object+ni
your - sinun or object+si
his/her - hänen or object+nsa
our - meidän or object+mme
your (pl.) - teidän or object+nne
their - heidän or object+nsa

However it is much cooler to change the object under possesion. For example:
Ei, olen isäsi - No, I am your father
Voimasi ovat heikot, ukko - Your powers are weak, old man

No articles

Finnish doesn't have definite or indefinite articles (the and a). Instead, whether you are talking about a, some, or the item in question is determined partially from context, and partially from the position in the sentence:

kukka - flower
pöytä - table
pöydällä - on the table

Kukka on pöydällä - (The) flower is on the table
Pöydällä on kukka - On the table is (a) flower.

Don't ask me how we know if it's a or the table.

Vowel harmony

Finnish has the following vowels:

Front vowels: ä, ö, y
Back vowels: a, o, u
Neutral vowels: e, i

Front vowels are, as their name suggest, sounded at the front of the mouth, and back vowels are sounded lower down the throat. A single word in Finnish either contains front vowels or back vowels, but not both (it can also contain neutral vowels). However, if two words are glued together and one contains back vowels and the other contains front vowels then ... well, you do end up with a word containing both, but it's really actually two words, isn't it?

To be or not to be

We had a nice regular verb last time, so now it is time to bite the bullet and learn about the most important, and most irregular verb. To be - olla.

olen - I am
olet - you are
hän on - he/she is
me olemme - we are
te olette - you (plural) are
he ovat - they are

As you can see, it is not terribly irregular - there's the usual n ending for I, t ending for you, and so on, but it doesn't have the same stem for all the conjugations. This verb is an important one - I've used it three times in this post already.

He or she?

Finnish doesn't distinguish between he and she, and uses the word hän for both of them. This has the disadvantage that you can't work out in some sentences whether the subject is male or female - but if you think about it that's actually an advantage. Writing instruction manuals is easier in Finnish than in English because you don't have to use clumsy constructions like "he or she" (and the corresponding requirement to switch she and he around each occurrence), or grammatically incorrect ones like "they".

In fact the only disadvantage to the Finns is that you meet the occasionally novice English learner who says things like "I saw my brother yesterday, and she is doing well." (For some reason they more commonly use she when they should use he, rather than the other way around).