Questions about Finnish / Kysymyksiä suomen kielestä

Moderator:Naava

User avatar
sa wulfs
Posts:4337
Joined:2005-02-28, 12:24
Real Name:Rober
Gender:male
Location:Madridissa
Country:ESSpain (España)
Re: Questions about Finnish / Kysymyksiä suomen kielestä

Postby sa wulfs » 2022-11-20, 11:36

Naava wrote:Turku dialect uses -s for imperfect more frequently than standard Finnish (similar to Estonian; people in South Western Finland were in close contact with (Northern) Estonians, and it shows) but not exclusively. It's only used for certain words, but I don't speak this dialect and I've never studied it, so I can't tell you what restrictions there are.

Thanks for the answer! That's super interesting.
I'd count all the bolded parts as a sign that this person is from Turku:

Sit ne kolme kutsuttiin paikal ja ope käski niittenki kertoo mitä oikeen tapahtus ja ei ne tietty sanonu et ne yritti mut hukuttaa vaa syytti mua siit et mä olin ilma lupaa lukenu niide kirjevihkoi ja ope kysys et onkse totta, et oonks mä oikeesti tehny nii, ja mä sanoin et joo

You can hear paikal, siit, and dropping of final -n in other people's speech, too, but it's also a quite typical feature of Turku dialect. If I heard someone use these short forms and the -s imperfect, I'd be quite certain they were from South Western Finland.

Wow, I assumed it was less heavily coded than that and now I realize that calling it "standard" puhekieli was a stretch despite the heavy lifting that the quotation marks were doing. The speech of that older character I mentioned who speaks full-on Turku dialect is quite different, more along the lines of the Kyläs Suomes video you posted, with the Turku diphthongs and everything. A couple quotes from this character:
Vanha Hämentiä risteykses sil oli etuajo-oikeus ku jos sen olis tarvinu topata täyres kuarmas mäkke, ni se ei olis päässy enä uurestas liikkel. Velipoika muista viäl ku kerram pikkupenskana nähtin ku pässi puski ohitte.

Mää en tiärä kummottos tämä vois sanno simmottos ku nykysin kaik tarttis sanno niim pal hianoste mut su silmäs verestä, sum pairas o fläkki ja...

Ku Birgitta lähti mä en nukkunu vuate ja siim pääsi sit jo mopo vähän karkaman käsist... No sää tiärät... viina o huano lääke kaikkem paitti krapula.

The other, younger character I quoted doesn't talk like this, for example she has the standard dipthongs, but she still said viäl at least once. In my head I saw this as a sign that the traditional Turku dialect is in the process of being replaced by a more uniform puhekieli that still has local characteristics but that is closer to the kind of speech you'd usually hear on TV. Would that be accurate?
If you're curious, here's how I would say the same thing in puhekieli:
Sitte ne kolme kutsuttiin paikallej-ja ope käski niittenkik-kertoo mitä oikeen tapahtuu ja ei ne tietty sanonu et ne yritti mun hukuttaa vaan syytti mua siitä et molin iliman lupaa lukenun-niitten kirjevvihkoja ja ope kysyy et onkse totta, et oonks mä oikeesti tehnyn-niin, ja mä sanoo-että joo.

The words where I've put a dash could be written as paikalle ja, niittenki kertoo, lukenu niitten or lukenut niitten since assimilating the final consonant is rather common in Finnish, but they don't really have that in Turku dialect so there would be a difference between how I and the character in that book would say these words.

Thanks for the transcription! The epenthetic vowel in iliman is cool, and it's useful to see an explicit representation of where the assimilation and gemination across word boundaries would occur in your dialect. On the face of it it looks like your dialect would be a bit easier to understand for an intermediate student with very little previous experience outside of kirjakieli.
http://ungelicisus.blogspot.com
Hrōþabaírhts sa Wulfs | Hrōðbeorht se Wulf | Hróðbjartr Úlfrinn | Hruodperaht der Wolf | Hrôthberht thê Wulf

User avatar
Naava
Forum Administrator
Posts:1783
Joined:2012-01-17, 20:24
Country:FIFinland (Suomi)

Re: Questions about Finnish / Kysymyksiä suomen kielestä

Postby Naava » 2022-11-21, 20:52

sa wulfs wrote:Wow, I assumed it was less heavily coded than that and now I realize that calling it "standard" puhekieli was a stretch despite the heavy lifting that the quotation marks were doing.

Well, standard would require some kind of standardisation, which has never been done to spoken forms of Finnish. :) It is quite difficult to get rid of everything that makes your speech regional when there isn't a standard form with rules that you could study. It also isn't something most people would want to do 24/7. Like Osmo Ikola has written in Kielikello (a journal of linguistics) in 1986:
Osmo Ikola wrote:Luulen, että yleispuhekielemme nykyään on epäyhtenäisempää, enemmän variaatioita sallivaa kuin vuosisadan alkukymmeninä. Suomen kielen statusta ei ole enää tarvinnut mainitulla tavalla pönkittää. Ja muutenkin tyyli on muuttunut, elämänmeno on monessa suhteessa tullut vapaammaksi, rennommaksi. Monissa sellaisissa tilanteissa, joissa ennen usein pyrittiin käyttämään huoliteltua kieltä, likipitäen yleiskieltä, sellainen tuntuisi nykyään kankealta ja teennäiseltä, joskus jopa naurettavalta.

Puhuessamme yleispuhekielestä täytyy tietenkin aina pitää mielessä, että eri kielimuotojen väliset rajat ovat liukuvat. Useimmat yksilöt käyttävät puhuessaan erilaisissa tilanteissa erilaisia rekistereitä. Sivistyneet, oppikoulun käyneet mutta monet muutkin, pystyvät tarvittaessa yleensä käyttelemään yleiskieltä tai yleispuhekielen eri asteita. Toisaalta he arkisissa oloissa useimmiten käyttävät jotakin alueellis-sosiaalista arkikieltä, lähikieltä, joka eroaa yleiskielestä milloin enemmän, milloin vähemmän.

(Short summary in English: yleispuhekieli or general (?) spoken Finnish has likely become more diverse and is likely to have more variation than Finnish spoken in the early 1900s, since back then people were more concerned of the status of Finnish and its appearance as a "real language" that can be used in science etc. Moreover, the contexts where Finnish is used have become more relaxed, and the kind of careful language that could even be close to standard Finnish would feel too stiff and formal, even ridiculous. Ikola also writes that it is important to keep in mind that the different forms of language exist in a continuum. People can and do use different levels of yleispuhekieli, sometimes they can use standard Finnish, and most often in their everyday lives, they'll be using the local puhekieli.)

I don't know the book you are reading, but I'd assume the speaker you quoted would be talking to people they know - that is, speaking in a context where a local puhekieli would be common.


The other, younger character I quoted doesn't talk like this, for example she has the standard dipthongs, but she still said viäl at least once. In my head I saw this as a sign that the traditional Turku dialect is in the process of being replaced by a more uniform puhekieli that still has local characteristics but that is closer to the kind of speech you'd usually hear on TV. Would that be accurate?

Yes and no. People have been worried since, what, the 1960s? that Finnish dialects would be dying out and eventually be replaced by some kind of spoken Finnish. Because of this, lots of linguists ran to record the "authentic dialects", preferaby spoken by old men who were thought to have preserved them the best, before they would be lost forever. That's where you get all these very interesting records that you can now listen to online, such as Taavi Rantanen (b. 1905, recorded 1972) and Nikolai Reunanen (b. 1889, recorded 1966).

But as the decades passed, to everyone's surprise, the dialects didn't die out. It has been observed that they've levelled out a little because of TV, radio, and Internet, and lots of old words have been forgotten (mostly because they were about agriculture, and we have different technology for it now). Studies have also shown that people who do not feel strong connection to their home town or who have moved out of their home region are less likely to speak in dialect. (This is something I have also noticed myself. I don't speak in dialect in Tampere, and neither do my friends. However, when I asked them, they said they do use their dialects at home - just like I do. I'd say it's rather typical that you won't hear dialects in big [university] cities with lots of people who've come from different parts of Finland.) People who have a strong connection to their home town and/or who haven't moved out are more likely to have a dialect. The studies have also noticed women are more likely to use puhekieli than men. Also, people used to be ashamed of their dialects: speaking in them was a sign you hadn't moved to a bigger city to study, so you were uneducated and lived in a farm like a peasant, you know. Not cool. This attitude has changed recently (as in, during the last 20 years). Nowadays, you can see dialect in semi-formal contexts like local newspapers, advertisements, even in job advertisements (another example here), visit-the-city-X guides and other "our city" type of ads, in different products (like this rye bread brand that had 9 different dialects represented in their bags one year), the Facebook post by the Finnish Tax Administration, and so on. You can also hear young people speak in their dialects in Youtube, such as pahalapsi, or in local puhekieli, like Sita Salminen (and her video quite well demonstrates that at least Oulu dialect is still commonly used, since she is listing things she has noticed while living in Oulu. That doesn't really show how teenagers speak, of course, but it's also not something that only very old people have.)

Speaking of age, there is this news article about a study made on Tampere dialect and change that you can read here! To summarise, people's speech doesn't stay the same: as you age and as your life changes, your speech changes as well, and this change is not just from a dialect to more general speech but also from a more general speech style to a stronger dialect.

You might also find this news article interesting. They interviewed Sanni Inget, who's 28 years old and makes videos on Instagram in Oulu dialect. If you click the recordings, you can also listen to her speaking in the dialect. Then there's this article in Kielikello about using dialects in Youtube videos that seems like it'd be worth reading. It's quite a long text and I haven't read it yet myself, but I'll leave the link here just in case. :)

So, to summarise: people have been worried the dialects would disappear for the past 50 years or so, but it hasn't happened yet. Instead, they've become almost trendy during the last decades. At the same time, the way people speak has certainly changed because of Internet and TV. So what can we say about the status of Turku dialect? Not much, I think. It's too early to say what will happen. It could be that as a university city, the newcomers influence the way the locals speak. It is also possible that the locals become prouder of their dialect as a symbol of their roots and identity, and start using it even more than now. And it is also possible that teenagers do not speak in the dialect now, but as they age, they start using it more. We'd need to do a longitudinal study to be sure. (I can't answer how much the Turku dialect has changed by now, because this is not something I've really read about, so I don't know if there's e.g. studies made on it.)

On the face of it it looks like your dialect would be a bit easier to understand for an intermediate student with very little previous experience outside of kirjakieli.

Well, that was (local) puhekieli so I would expect it to look somewhat familiar to you. :) It's true though that my dialect is one of the most conservative ones in Finland and it belongs to the Western Finnish dialects, which are both reasons why it is closer to standard Finnish than some other dialects might be. (Not the closest though - IMO the dialects spoken in Central Finland are even closer since that region is between Western and Eastern dialects, and standard Finnish is a mixture of Western and Eastern dialects.) If you'd like to test how much you could understand of my dialect, you can listen to it here, here and here. :)

User avatar
sa wulfs
Posts:4337
Joined:2005-02-28, 12:24
Real Name:Rober
Gender:male
Location:Madridissa
Country:ESSpain (España)

Re: Questions about Finnish / Kysymyksiä suomen kielestä

Postby sa wulfs » 2022-11-26, 0:53

Naava wrote: Like Osmo Ikola has written in Kielikello (a journal of linguistics) in 1986:
Osmo Ikola wrote:Luulen, että yleispuhekielemme nykyään on epäyhtenäisempää, enemmän variaatioita sallivaa kuin vuosisadan alkukymmeninä. Suomen kielen statusta ei ole enää tarvinnut mainitulla tavalla pönkittää. Ja muutenkin tyyli on muuttunut, elämänmeno on monessa suhteessa tullut vapaammaksi, rennommaksi. Monissa sellaisissa tilanteissa, joissa ennen usein pyrittiin käyttämään huoliteltua kieltä, likipitäen yleiskieltä, sellainen tuntuisi nykyään kankealta ja teennäiseltä, joskus jopa naurettavalta.

Puhuessamme yleispuhekielestä täytyy tietenkin aina pitää mielessä, että eri kielimuotojen väliset rajat ovat liukuvat. Useimmat yksilöt käyttävät puhuessaan erilaisissa tilanteissa erilaisia rekistereitä. Sivistyneet, oppikoulun käyneet mutta monet muutkin, pystyvät tarvittaessa yleensä käyttelemään yleiskieltä tai yleispuhekielen eri asteita. Toisaalta he arkisissa oloissa useimmiten käyttävät jotakin alueellis-sosiaalista arkikieltä, lähikieltä, joka eroaa yleiskielestä milloin enemmän, milloin vähemmän.


(Short summary in English: yleispuhekieli or general (?) spoken Finnish has likely become more diverse and is likely to have more variation than Finnish spoken in the early 1900s, since back then people were more concerned of the status of Finnish and its appearance as a "real language" that can be used in science etc. Moreover, the contexts where Finnish is used have become more relaxed, and the kind of careful language that could even be close to standard Finnish would feel too stiff and formal, even ridiculous. Ikola also writes that it is important to keep in mind that the different forms of language exist in a continuum. People can and do use different levels of yleispuhekieli, sometimes they can use standard Finnish, and most often in their everyday lives, they'll be using the local puhekieli.)

I guess this concept of yleispuhekieli would be what I was trying to convey (clumsily) with "standard" puhekieli, good to know there's a proper term for it (and also that I need to be more careful with it because things are apparently way more complex than I had thought :P). What Ikola said about a continuum is particularly interesting. I used to have a Finnish teacher who was probably in his 60s and who had lived in Spain for decades at that point, and he always complained about our books mixing kirjakieli and puhekieli traits when trying to teach us the rudiments of puhekieli. He said that nobody wrote like that. Perhaps that was true before texting and the internet made informal writing so ubiquituous, but whenever I hop onto Finnish reddit I see people kinda mixing forms, or I guess it would be more accurate to say, sitting on different points of the standard-to-dialectal language continuum.

(Of course, informal texts are still written texts so I imagine they're still closer to the written standard than informal speech would be)
I don't know the book you are reading, but I'd assume the speaker you quoted would be talking to people they know - that is, speaking in a context where a local puhekieli would be common.

In the quote I posted the character was speaking in a classroom as a university student, where I guess more formal language use would be conceivable, but she speaks the same way in one-on-one conversations with a friend so yeah, pretty much.
Yes and no. People have been worried since, what, the 1960s? that Finnish dialects would be dying out and eventually be replaced by some kind of spoken Finnish. Because of this, lots of linguists ran to record the "authentic dialects", preferaby spoken by old men who were thought to have preserved them the best, before they would be lost forever. That's where you get all these very interesting records that you can now listen to online, such as Taavi Rantanen (b. 1905, recorded 1972) and Nikolai Reunanen (b. 1889, recorded 1966).

But as the decades passed, to everyone's surprise, the dialects didn't die out. It has been observed that they've levelled out a little because of TV, radio, and Internet, and lots of old words have been forgotten (mostly because they were about agriculture, and we have different technology for it now). Studies have also shown that people who do not feel strong connection to their home town or who have moved out of their home region are less likely to speak in dialect. (This is something I have also noticed myself. I don't speak in dialect in Tampere, and neither do my friends. However, when I asked them, they said they do use their dialects at home - just like I do. I'd say it's rather typical that you won't hear dialects in big [university] cities with lots of people who've come from different parts of Finland.) People who have a strong connection to their home town and/or who haven't moved out are more likely to have a dialect. The studies have also noticed women are more likely to use puhekieli than men. Also, people used to be ashamed of their dialects: speaking in them was a sign you hadn't moved to a bigger city to study, so you were uneducated and lived in a farm like a peasant, you know. Not cool. This attitude has changed recently (as in, during the last 20 years).

This is super interesting, thanks! I guess it makes sense that internal migration would have a greater disruptive potential on dialects than mass media, but it's nice to hear the dialects are here to stay. I mean, as a student it's still a bit intimidating, but it's great that the stigma is disappearing. (And hopefully after reaching a certain level the differences between the dialects aren't a big obstacle anymore)
Nowadays, you can see dialect in semi-formal contexts like local newspapers, advertisements, even in job advertisements (another example here), visit-the-city-X guides and other "our city" type of ads, in different products (like this rye bread brand that had 9 different dialects represented in their bags one year), the Facebook post by the Finnish Tax Administration, and so on. You can also hear young people speak in their dialects in Youtube, such as pahalapsi, or in local puhekieli, like Sita Salminen (and her video quite well demonstrates that at least Oulu dialect is still commonly used, since she is listing things she has noticed while living in Oulu. That doesn't really show how teenagers speak, of course, but it's also not something that only very old people have.)

Wow, that mää tekkiin thing in Sita Salminen's video completely caught me off my guard :D. It's interesting that even going from Rovaniemi to Oulu some of the differences are quite striking, I mean it's not at all uncommon for dialects to be quite different even across shorter distances but it's still cool to see it.
You might also find this news article interesting. They interviewed Sanni Inget, who's 28 years old and makes videos on Instagram in Oulu dialect. If you click the recordings, you can also listen to her speaking in the dialect. Then there's this article in Kielikello about using dialects in Youtube videos that seems like it'd be worth reading. It's quite a long text and I haven't read it yet myself, but I'll leave the link here just in case. :)

Thanks for the reading material! That epenthetic vowel in /lC/ clusters seems to be quite popular, Sita Salminen even said "helevetin outoja" at one point in that video you posted even though she pronounced those clusters without an epenthetic vowel otherwise (I don't know if that was her own dialect slipping through, an Oulu trait she picked up and that then slipped through, or a conscious attempt to imitate the Oulu dialect in that particular phrase, though). It's also great to see actual professors talking about this kind of thing.
So, to summarise: people have been worried the dialects would disappear for the past 50 years or so, but it hasn't happened yet. Instead, they've become almost trendy during the last decades. At the same time, the way people speak has certainly changed because of Internet and TV. So what can we say about the status of Turku dialect? Not much, I think. It's too early to say what will happen. It could be that as a university city, the newcomers influence the way the locals speak. It is also possible that the locals become prouder of their dialect as a symbol of their roots and identity, and start using it even more than now. And it is also possible that teenagers do not speak in the dialect now, but as they age, they start using it more. We'd need to do a longitudinal study to be sure. (I can't answer how much the Turku dialect has changed by now, because this is not something I've really read about, so I don't know if there's e.g. studies made on it.)

Thanks! That was a great summary to a super informative post. Thanks for taking the time to put it together :)
Well, that was (local) puhekieli so I would expect it to look somewhat familiar to you. :) It's true though that my dialect is one of the most conservative ones in Finland and it belongs to the Western Finnish dialects, which are both reasons why it is closer to standard Finnish than some other dialects might be. (Not the closest though - IMO the dialects spoken in Central Finland are even closer since that region is between Western and Eastern dialects, and standard Finnish is a mixture of Western and Eastern dialects.) If you'd like to test how much you could understand of my dialect, you can listen to it here, here and here. :)

Yeah I'm not good at this haha. Although to be fair I don't think I would have fared much better with perfectly standard Finnish, I'm just terrible at listening comprehension in general. Although to be fair again, I understand everyone in those videos much better than I understand the bearded old man in the second video, so maybe that's the problem here :lol:

It's so cool that they have preserved the /h/ in the illative though.
http://ungelicisus.blogspot.com
Hrōþabaírhts sa Wulfs | Hrōðbeorht se Wulf | Hróðbjartr Úlfrinn | Hruodperaht der Wolf | Hrôthberht thê Wulf

User avatar
Naava
Forum Administrator
Posts:1783
Joined:2012-01-17, 20:24
Country:FIFinland (Suomi)

Re: Questions about Finnish / Kysymyksiä suomen kielestä

Postby Naava » 2022-12-04, 22:56

sa wulfs wrote:-- (and also that I need to be more careful with it because things are apparently way more complex than I had thought :P).

A summary of what it's like to learn Finnish, hm? :mrgreen:

What Ikola said about a continuum is particularly interesting. I used to have a Finnish teacher who was probably in his 60s and who had lived in Spain for decades at that point, and he always complained about our books mixing kirjakieli and puhekieli traits when trying to teach us the rudiments of puhekieli. He said that nobody wrote like that.

It's hard to comment on this because I don't know what the words or phrases that he criticised were, but it's possible that A) he had been away from Finland for so long that the language had changed B) he was too old (sorry! :p) and the book was based on how young people spoke C) the book was bad or D) it's so hard to mimic a spoken form of language in text and do it in a way that the learners can still understand that it often ends up sounding unnatural.

Perhaps that was true before texting and the internet made informal writing so ubiquituous, but whenever I hop onto Finnish reddit I see people kinda mixing forms, or I guess it would be more accurate to say, sitting on different points of the standard-to-dialectal language continuum.

Oh yeah, I've seen people writing in full dialect, in some local puhekieli, general puhekieli, in nearly standard Finnish with a few non-standard features (like mä for minä), and in full standard Finnish*. Before the Internet and texting, the norm was to write only in standard Finnish. Some old people still stick to that and find the way younger generations write wrong.

*Here's an example: two teenagers are talking about an exam. Sami is writing in the local puhekieli. (It's harder to say about his friend because there's only two very short sentences from him.) This one is in full dialect as far as I can tell. Here (the last screenshot) Tommi says he speaks in dialect, but he's written the post in standard Finnish. The comments below the post are in puhekieli.

I don't know the book you are reading, but I'd assume the speaker you quoted would be talking to people they know - that is, speaking in a context where a local puhekieli would be common.

In the quote I posted the character was speaking in a classroom as a university student, where I guess more formal language use would be conceivable, but she speaks the same way in one-on-one conversations with a friend so yeah, pretty much.

Classrooms are not formal places in Finland, and even though it's certainly less informal than when you're hanging out with your closest friends or when you're talking to your family, people don't change their speech all that much when they're talking during lessons. But it's possible that you'd hear dialects less often in university classrooms because people tend to drop their dialects when they move outside their home region, which is what many if not most uni students in Finland have to do.

Wow, that mää tekkiin thing in Sita Salminen's video completely caught me off my guard :D. It's interesting that even going from Rovaniemi to Oulu some of the differences are quite striking, I mean it's not at all uncommon for dialects to be quite different even across shorter distances but it's still cool to see it.

Yes; the dialects spoken in those cities are not only different, but they also belong to different dialect groups. Rovaniemi is part of the Peräpohjola dialects (6c in the map), while Oulu belongs to the North Ostrobothnian dialects (5b in the map). Here's some info and examples of Peräpohjola dialects in English: 1, 2, and here's a short description of North Ostrobothnian. I also found two blog posts, one in Rovaniemi dialect and one in Oulu dialect.

If you're interested in dialects, here's a cool site where you can listen to records of young people speaking in their dialects. They all tell the same fictional story of the speaker explaning how they went late to a theatre once. My absolute favourite thing there is that the Kuopio story is thrice as long as the other versions, because there's a well-known stereotype that Savonians speak a lot and never give you a short answer. :lol:

Thanks for the reading material! That epenthetic vowel in /lC/ clusters seems to be quite popular, Sita Salminen even said "helevetin outoja" at one point in that video you posted even though she pronounced those clusters without an epenthetic vowel otherwise (I don't know if that was her own dialect slipping through, an Oulu trait she picked up and that then slipped through, or a conscious attempt to imitate the Oulu dialect in that particular phrase, though).

I think helevetti is popular, but I don't know if it's something you'd hear everywhere in Finland. The epenthetic vowel is part of many dialects, though, including both Peräpohjola (Rovaniemi) and North Ostrobothnian dialects (Oulu), so it could be just her dialect slipping through. (Here's infoabout the epenthetic vowel in Finnish.)

Thanks! That was a great summary to a super informative post. Thanks for taking the time to put it together :)

No problem! I'm glad to hear you found it fun and interesting. :)

It's so cool that they have preserved the /h/ in the illative though.

You can hear the -h- in illative in South, Central, and North Ostrobothnian dialects, in Peräpohjola dialects, Meänkieli, Kven language, Karelian language, and to some extent in Southwestern dialects. However, in many dialects, a vowel has been lost (saunahan -> saunhan)* or the H has undergone metathesis (saunahan -> saunhaan, sauhnan, sauhnaan). AFAIK the only dialects where the illative has been kept unchanged are some of the South Ostrobothnian dialects. Southwestern dialects seem to use -VhN for illative less consistently, and they have also dropped the final -n (talohon -> taloho). I'm also not sure if this is a common feature of all Soutwestern dialects or only some of them, nor do I know if it's something people still use nowadays. :hmm:

*This is what has happened in Karelian as well, although there the lost vowel is the one following H: kalahan -> kalah.

Linguaphile
Posts:5358
Joined:2016-09-17, 5:06

Re: Questions about Finnish / Kysymyksiä suomen kielestä

Postby Linguaphile » 2023-01-16, 14:29

For Estonian, there is an online lemmatizer here: Eesti keele lemmatiseerija, where you can type in a word that you find somewhere, for example lastegagi ("even with children"), and it will tell you that its lemma (nominative singular form) is laps. This is useful when you encounter a word and can't work out its base form in order to look it up in a dictionary. Is there a similar resource for Finnish online? (I think I've seen programs to download, but I'm looking for one that is online, like the Estonian one.)

User avatar
Naava
Forum Administrator
Posts:1783
Joined:2012-01-17, 20:24
Country:FIFinland (Suomi)

Re: Questions about Finnish / Kysymyksiä suomen kielestä

Postby Naava » 2023-01-16, 20:35

Linguaphile wrote:This is useful when you encounter a word and can't work out its base form in order to look it up in a dictionary. Is there a similar resource for Finnish online? (I think I've seen programs to download, but I'm looking for one that is online, like the Estonian one.)

Cooljugator seems to work pretty well! You still need to know some rules (e.g. how participles work), but other than that it is quite decent. For example, it doesn't recognise the word lapsineenkin (even with his/her children), but it does give you lapsineen (with his/her children).

Linguaphile
Posts:5358
Joined:2016-09-17, 5:06

Re: Questions about Finnish / Kysymyksiä suomen kielestä

Postby Linguaphile » 2023-01-16, 20:58

Naava wrote:
Linguaphile wrote:This is useful when you encounter a word and can't work out its base form in order to look it up in a dictionary. Is there a similar resource for Finnish online? (I think I've seen programs to download, but I'm looking for one that is online, like the Estonian one.)

Cooljugator seems to work pretty well! You still need to know some rules (e.g. how participles work), but other than that it is quite decent. For example, it doesn't recognise the word lapsineenkin (even with his/her children), but it does give you lapsineen (with his/her children).

Cool, thanks! I didn't realize Cooljugator did anything other than verbs.

User avatar
Hoogstwaarschijnlijk
Posts:7089
Joined:2005-11-30, 10:21
Location:Utrecht
Country:NLThe Netherlands (Nederland)

Re: Questions about Finnish / Kysymyksiä suomen kielestä

Postby Hoogstwaarschijnlijk » 2023-02-07, 20:42

Hi!

What's the logic about using valkoinen/suomalainen or valkoista/suomalista? What kind of case is this?
Native: Dutch
Learns: Latin and French
Knows also (a bit): English, German, Turkish, Danish

Corrections appreciated.

Linguaphile
Posts:5358
Joined:2016-09-17, 5:06

Re: Questions about Finnish / Kysymyksiä suomen kielestä

Postby Linguaphile » 2023-02-07, 22:11

Hoogstwaarschijnlijk wrote:Hi!

What's the logic about using valkoinen/suomalainen or valkoista/suomalaista? What kind of case is this?


Words like valkoinen and suomalainen are nominative singular case. Words like valkoista and suomalaista are partitive singular.

User avatar
Naava
Forum Administrator
Posts:1783
Joined:2012-01-17, 20:24
Country:FIFinland (Suomi)

Re: Questions about Finnish / Kysymyksiä suomen kielestä

Postby Naava » 2023-02-07, 22:19

Hoogstwaarschijnlijk wrote:Hi!

What's the logic about using valkoinen/suomalainen or valkoista/suomalista? What kind of case is this?

Valkoinen/suomalainen is nominative and valkoista/suomalaista is partitive. Adjectives agree with the noun in Finnish, so you would use nominative when the noun is in nominative and partitive when the noun is in partitive. Sometimes adjectives can be also used on their own (a bit like how in English you could say "the rich" instead of "the rich people"), and then they behave like nouns would (nominative when nominative is needed, partitive when partitive is needed).

Some examples where you'd need a nominative (valkoinen/suomalainen):
- when describing what something is like (this book is white = tämä kirja on valkoinen)
- with subjects (the white book is on the table = valkoinen kirja on pöydällä)
- with objects when imperative mood is used (take the white book! = ota valkoinen kirja)

A very simplified explanation when to use partitive in Finnish is that it's one of the cases that objects can be in. If you wish to read a more detailed list, you can do so here. The examples don't always have adjectives, but you could add them there if you wanted:

- luen kirjaa (I'm reading a book) >> luen valkoista kirjaa (I'm reading a/the white book)

- en osta tätä puseroa (I won't buy this shirt) >> en osta tätä valkoista puseroa (I won't buy this white shirt)

- talo on [keskellä metsää] (the house is [in the middle of a forest]) >> talo on [keskellä suomalaista metsää] (the house is [in the middle of a Finnish forest])

User avatar
Hoogstwaarschijnlijk
Posts:7089
Joined:2005-11-30, 10:21
Location:Utrecht
Country:NLThe Netherlands (Nederland)

Re: Questions about Finnish / Kysymyksiä suomen kielestä

Postby Hoogstwaarschijnlijk » 2023-02-08, 9:23

Thank you both, that was very helpful!
Native: Dutch
Learns: Latin and French
Knows also (a bit): English, German, Turkish, Danish

Corrections appreciated.


Return to “Finnish (Suomi)”

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 8 guests