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.