#its all very neat. I LOVE YOU AJAA

[mekatrio]

still in disbelief over this post i saw cuz how do u play 4 whole games of ace attorney maybe more and not see the problem with the concept of "decisive evidence"........

[greaseonmymouth]

Finnish Grammar Gothic Explained

Handy link to Finnish Grammar Gothic.

Accusative The accusative case is the object case. In the sentence 'the man bought flowers', flowers is the object. In languages that have accusative, the object takes on a form different from the nominative (or dictionary) form. (English does not have accusative.) 

Examples:  German: Nominative: der Mann Accusative: den Mann Icelandic: Nominative: hattur Accusative: hatt

In Finnish, the accusative case is taught to native Finns in school as having the following endings: -n -t - (none) And then further complicates the case by setting up requirements, for example: the -n ending is used only if it's a whole object.

Some researchers (AND ME, I AM ALSO OF THIS OPINION) believe that in Finnish the accusative case does not exist. As in, it's wrong to say that Finnish has accusative, because the object in Finnish behaves differently from what is traditionally understood by accusative. Accusative works perfectly for the Germanic languages I demonstrated above, but a) Finnish is not a Germanic language and b) Finnish grammar was initially described by Germanic linguists who forced Finnish into their neat little grammar boxes (these grammar boxes were largely based on latin grammar) and it's taken decades to undo some of the misunderstood work they did and that later research was based on, if it's been undone at all. This is is an ongoing problem in Fennistics and particularly the Saami languages suffer from this. (sidenote: this is also what colonisation can look like.)

So: Finnish does have objects in its sentences, of course, but I am wholly against calling the object case in in Finnish accusative, when upon closer look the object case is not one case but several different cases that correspond to different semantics. So, to paraphrase and simplify a paper I wrote about this once upon a time, the object cases in Finnish are: - Partitive - Genitive - Nominative (this includes plural nominative)

Examples: Luen kirjan - genitive. Whole object/complete action. I read the whole book. Luen kirjaa - partitive. Incomplete object/action. I am reading a book and it's unclear whether I will read the whole book. Lue kirja! - nominative. Imperative sentences always have the object in nominative.

This entire issue is far more complex than I've described here, but I'm leaving it at this because otherwise I will end up reproducing my entire paper and I honestly cannot be arsed.

Imperative In Finnish, imperative is a complex thing and you need to take into account the following: - 1st, 2nd or 3rd person - singular or plural - active or passive - positive or negative

Some examples:

2nd person, active, positive, singular: Mene! (go!) 2nd person, active, negative, singular: Älä mene! (don't go!)

The same in plural: Menkää! (go!) Alkää menkö! (don't go!)

3rd person negative: Älköön unohtako (let him/her not forget)

Passives: Tehtäköön (let (sth) be done), Älköön tehtäkö (let (sth) not be done)

The most common and used imperative forms are the 2nd person and plural forms.

Vowel length In Finnish there is a huge difference between tällä and täällä. Or tuli and tuuli. These are not the same words. So, there's short vowels (tuli) and long vowels (tuuli), and to distinguish between them in speech, the long vowels are long. It's usually said they're twice as long as the short vowels, as that's how they're written, but actually - and research has been done on this - they are more like 2.5-3 times as long. Native Finns don't notice this and you'll find most of them will parrot what's been told to them: that long vowels are twice as long. They're not. They're longer. And one of the things you are made to do as a student of Finnish, is to practise vocalisation. So you are absolutely made to sit there and say all the vowels and exaggerate their length. Repeatedly. Until you get it.

Verb types

The six verb types in Finnish are:

Type 1: -a/-ä verbs. The final -a or -ä is always preceded by a vowel. Words of this type are: Puhua, sanoa, istua, ajaa, katsoa, herättää, ymmärtää, rakastaa

Type 2: -da/-dä verbs. Examples: Juoda, luoda, syödä, saada, jäädä, käydä, myydä, pysäköidä, tupakoida And the two irregular verbs of type 2: tehdä, nähdä

Type 3: -lla/-llä, -rra/-rrä, -sta/-stä, -nna/-nnä verbs. Examples: Tulla, mennä, purra, nousta, ajatella, pestä, surra, ratkaista, kävellä, hymyillä And the two irregular verbs of type 3: olla, juosta

Type 4: -ata/-ätä, -ota/-ötä, -uta/-ytä verbs. Examples: Haluta, osata, siivota, hypätä, kadota, älytä, hakata, erota, herätä

Type 5: -ita/-itä verbs. Examples: Häiritä, tarvita, hallita, mainita, merkitä,

Type 6: -eta/-etä verbs. These verbs usually mean that they change state from one to the other. -eta/-etä verbs which do not have the 'change state' meaning are conjugated like verb type 4 verbs. Examples: Vaaleta, lämmetä, kylmetä, vanheta, kalveta, nuoreta, tummeta, pidetä

The joke I made in the gothic post came from the fact that in the book Suomen Mestari 1 the first 5 verb types are explained, but not the 6th. The 6th verb type is taught in Suomen Mestari 2.

Vowel Harmony The vowels in Finnish are: a o u i e y ö ä

They are grouped like this: a o u (back vowels) i e (neutral) y ö ä (front vowels)

The rule is that you can't have front and back vowels in the same word. So you can have soittaa but not soittää. Exceptions to this are loan words (analyysi) or compound words (syyskuu, syys + kuu).

Consonant Gradation Aka the bane of my existence.

Finnish, along with many other fennic languages, has consonant gradation. (Native Finns will know this as k-p-t- vaihtelu or astevaihtelu.) It means that when you conjugate words, they will be in either a strong or a weak grade (hence consonant gradation), depending on a whole lot of factors but ultimately it's based on syllables and whether they are closed or open. Yeah, no need to look at me like that, I know. The gradation only occurs with the consonants k, p or t. Luckily, unlike in certain other languages (side-eyeing some Saami languages p hard right here) there are only two stages of consonant gradation in Finnish.

Here's what it looks like:

Strong: pp, kk, tt Weak: p, k, t (Examples: kauppa - kaupan, kakku - kakun, katto - katon)

Also: Strong: p, k, t Weak: v, g/v/j/-, d (Examples: katu - kadun, mäki - mäen, puku - puvun)

And also: Strong: mp, nt, lt, rt, nk Weak: mm, nn, ll, rr, ng (Examples: hammas - hampaat, lento - lennot, kenkä - kengät, parta - parrat)

Not to mention gradation in some new loan words, like: Strong: bb, gg Weak: b, g (Example: blogata - bloggaan)

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I'm not even going to explain how the syllable thing works because fuck consonant gradation, that's why, and also: you can't make me.

There's no future The Finnish tenses are, and I'm sorry if this vocab is odd, I had four different grammar books in four different languages and none of them agreed with each other so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ : 

Present (olen - I am) Imperfect (olin - I was) Perfect (olen ollut - I have been) Plusquamperfekt (olin ollut - I had been)

No future tense. Future is usually indicated by using present tense and then some marker of time, e.g. 'tulen perjantaina' 'I will come on Friday'.

(Guess which language also doesn’t have future? English!)

Sentence replacements I will be very disappointed if native Finns don't know what sentence replacements are (lauseenvastikkeet) because these are my FAVOURITE. And also they are just really elegant! I love sentence replacements! THEY ARE GOOD THINGS AND SHOULD BE CHERISHED.

Anyway, what these do is that they replace sentences with a single word or phrase shorter than the sentence they replaced. In other words: they simplify sentences while also packing a lot of information into one word (or very few words).

There are nine types of sentence replacements according to Finn Lectura and because I don't feel like getting into ALL the variants and discussions, let's just go with that. The quantum sentence replacement (kvantum-lauseenvastike) mentioned in the gothic post is constructed like this:

Verb + translative + possessive suffix  Tietää | kse| ni

Tietääkseni asia on jo ratkaistu. (As far as I know, the problem has already been solved) Muistaakseni sellaista ei ole ennen sattunut. (As far as I remember, nothing like this has happened before.)

Another example of what a sentence replacement can do is the referential sentence replacement (referatiivinen lauseenvastike). That one is constructed like this:

Verb + 1. participle + genitive Lähte | vä | n

Sanoin sinun lähtevän. I saidthat you left. The same sentence in Finnish without the sentence replacement would be: Sanoin, että sinä lähdet.

New words are easy to create I'm just gonna leave this image here.

-i nouns There are several noun types (20+) in Finnish, that are all conjugated differently. The -i nouns, or nouns ending in i, come in four groups.

New words/loan words: Banaani, pankki, äiti, bussi (yes, äiti is a loan word. It's also considered a new loan word, because it entered the language relatively late.)

Old words, group one aka the 'mixed bag of old': Mäki, joki, lehti, tähti, niemi,

Another group of old words, the -si words: Kausi, kuusi, uusi, vuosi, käsi, vesi, hiisi

Another group of old words, the -li, -ri, -ni words: Pieni, sieni, hiiri, veri, suoni, kieli,

The old words generally have in common that they are nature related and that they go waaaaay back, and also that i becomes e in the stem. Here's how they differ:

Nominative - genitive - partitive Pankki - pankin - pankkia Bussi - bussin - bussia New words retain the i in the stem

Mäki - mäen - mäkeä Lehti - lehden - lehteä i becomes e in the stem

Uusi - uuden - uutta Käsi - käden - kättä -si is -den in genitive and -tta/-ttä in partitive AKA i becomes e in the stem, and in the partitive the vowel disappears, and the partitive is formed on basis of a consonant stem. This group is special because -si used to be -ti. If that were still the case, they'd be conjugated like the words below, but they had to branch off and go be ~special so whatever i guess ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Veri - veren - verta Kieli - kielen - kieltä  Pieni - pienen - pientä  i becomes e in the stem and in partitive the vowel disappears and the partitive is formed on basis of a consonant stem.

The number of cases in Finnish Not only is the existence of accusative contested, the researchers also can't quite agree whether to count cases that are no longer actively or rarely used, and cases that only exist in fossilised forms. Examples below.

Cases:

Accusative (let's never talk about accusative again)

Instructive -n: Omin käsin (with my own hands) Omin silmin (with my own two eyes)

Comitative -ine: Hän vaikuttaa varakkaalta monine taloineen. (he/she appears to be wealthy, with the many houses he has.) Hän saapui kauniine vaimoineen. (he/she arrived with his/her beautiful wife.)

Prolative -tse: Postitse (by mail) Puhelimitse (by phone) Meritse (by sea)

The Most important Word in Finnish

Just watch this video.