Insane Finnish Letters (Part 1)

It’s been a while since I had a good moan about the trickiness of the Finnish language, but it’s now time to tackle one of my pet grievances: the instability of Finnish letters.

This is such a wide subject, that I will have to cover it over more than one post. I know you all love a bit of grammar really…

I first encountered the problem of Finnish letter instability a few years ago, at a time when my knowledge of Finnish was even more primitive than it is now.

In a little piece of text I was attempting to decipher, I came across the word “illalla”. I didn’t know what it meant, so I set about looking it up in the dictionary. I checked “illalla” and found nothing. Then I had a brainwave: maybe the ending “-lla” was the adessiivi case, meaning “onto or at” something. So I looked up the remaining “illa” in the dictionary. Again, nothing.

I eventually found out through a Finn, that “illalla” means “in the evening”. The reason I could not find this in the dictionary is that the word “evening” is actually “ilta”, but the “t” morphs into an “l” more or less at will as it goes through the various Finnish cases. So for example, while “two evenings” is “kaksi iltaa” (partitiivi), “from evening to morning” is “illasta aamuun” (elatiivi).

But “t” doesn’t always turn into an “l”… Oh no, that would be too simple (this is Finnish after all).

The best way to observe the schizophrenic behaviour of Finnish letters in nouns, which linguists call “gradation” (astevaihtelu in Finnish), is to consider their nominatiivi (noun as the sentence’s subject – the evening) and genitiivi (“the evening’s” or “of the evening”).

Still with me?

So I have just described the “ilta / illan” pair. However, the “t” can also become a “d” (katu / kadun – street), “n” (ranta / rannan – shore) or an “r” (“parta” / “parran” – beard). The “t” can also stay put (“kosto” / “koston” – revenge) or it can disappear altogether (“katto” / “katon” – roof). Indeed, it can even duplicate itself (“vaate” / “vaatteen” – item of clothing) or appear out of nowhere (“liikenne” / “liikenteen” – traffic).

Crazy, huh?

Were it only the “t” that behaved in an erratic way... But no, “p”, “v”, and “k” also have their own idiosyncrasies, not to mention the vowels! But that, ladies and gentlemen, is for a later post.