In almost every discussion of language variation in the world, Finnish comes up due to its wealth of case endings. There are languages that have even more, such as Hungarian, and most languages have less. Of the languages I've learned that mark cases with suffixes, I could say that on average they have somewhere around 6 cases (excluding of course, languages very closely related to Finnish which have a similar number). I've learned some with slightly more, and some with slightly less. This amount of cases is what usually gets Finnish labeled as "difficult", but, this difficulty doesn't make Finnish impossible to learn.

Here I've attempted to collect some of my own internal reasonings based on the various things I've read over the course of time I've learned Finnish. As such, a lot of the material I don't remember my source for... Except for this source, a brief grammatical reference, which I used to check the latinate case names which I often forget. I'll list some additional resources below, as I remember or come across them, for those interested. One of the great resources is Hakulinen's Suomen kielen rakenne ja kehitys 'Structure and Development of the Finnish Language', but sadly I don't have access to it right now to check some of my memories and theories.

What are cases?

So, for those of you who maybe want to read the rest of this, but don't know what cases are, it's fairly simple. Case marks the grammatical role of an item in a sentence, which may be something like whether the item is a subject (a doer), or an object (the patient or recipient of an action). In English pronouns, we can that they differ in form for these roles (1), but in plain nouns, it's impossible to see the difference. On the other hand, in English, we know what role something has in the sentence based on word order (2). Case is of course, a bit more complex than just this, but that's what you need to know to follow the rest of the story.

(1) She saw her.
(2) The dog bit the man.

With Finnish (as with other languages), even more sentence roles are marked with separate cases, as well as locations. They are used to mark if something is on a shelf or in a box; or, whether someone gave something to someone or got it from them. In Finnish, there is even a different case for giving something to someone, and when someone turns into a frog. As you can see from these previous sentences, English does this with prepositions, and this is just as big of a source of consternation for English learners as case suffixes can be for learners of languages like Finnish.

Cases in Finnish

By most counts, Finnish has 15 cases. Some people often like to lump other more rare suffixes in with these, but the most commonly agreed upon number is 15, because all of this particular set of 15 cases behave in the same way: in a noun phrase, they must occur on all adjectives, and they may be productively used on pretty much any noun. In the following example, you can see that the inessive case (the internal location case) -ssa/-ssä is assigned to every adjective associated with the word talo 'house'. Some other adverbial case endings (such as the prolative case, meaning 'via') don't behave this way, and so they're excluded from the count.

(3)
Asun piene-ssä sinise-ssä talo-ssa.
I live in a small blue house.

The other issue in Finnish cases is just their names. I can never remember all the latinate names for the locative cases, because they're fairly opaque to me. Conveniently, Finnish has its own categorization and naming system to account for them, so that there are olento 'being' cases, eronto 'separating' cases, and tulento 'arriving' cases; and then there are sisä- 'internal' and ulko- 'external' cases. I'll attempt to use more clear terms like these in English, and stray from the latinate names (but not without explaining them frequently). Another naming system that some friends in an English department in Helsinki suggested were case names like in-itive, out-itive, into-itive, from-itive, and so on. As humorous as they sound, those are possibly the clearest and most concise ways of describing Finnish cases in English that I've heard yet.

Now, here's an exhaustive table of cases in Finnish, along with their latinate names, Finnish names, and what they function as. You'll see they can be grouped together— but, more on that soon.

Searching for a method to the locative madness

Finnish locative cases have a rather interesting history. One of the assumptions of old Uralic languages (the family that Finnish and Hungarian belong to) is that they had three main cases: lative (motion toward), separative (motion away) and locative (static location). Over the course of history, these fused with suffixes marking external or internal location, or states. So, if we have two variables in which there are 3 options, we would expect 9 locative cases, and we almost find this, but with two exceptions.

First, the distinction between separative cases and static locative cases is the easiest to find patterns in. The separative cases all have -ta/-tä, and the static locative cases all end on some consonant and -a/-ä. Historically, static locative case was always -na/-nä (still found in at least one Finnic language: South Sámi), and over time it began to assimilate with preceding consonants, giving rise to suffixes like -lla/-llä, and -ssa/-ssä. Since an illustration helps, here's a table of just the separative and the locative cases:

There's one gap, however, and this is the excessive (separative state) case. It's found in some dialects of Finnish still, but in very few locations; however, it fits the pattern of having the separative case ending, and something that we can assume to be a state suffix.

(4)
Sää muuttui synkäntä.
The weather changed from being gloomy.

Problems with the lative

The cases based that mark motion toward are a bit more complex in Finnish. With the help of other languages, we can see a pattern to it, but what it comes down to is that this set of cases are most exceptional, as a whole.* The allative (external motion toward, -lle) is most obviously related to the other external separative and locative cases. The translative (state change, -ksi) has an alternate form when personal suffixes follow: -kse-, which shows something of its history. The illative (motion into) has numerous forms depending on the preceding vowel (listed exhaustively here), which are supposedly derived from a historical *-sen suffix, that underwent a lot of change.

One might predict that the illative could have a form similar to the allative's (external motion toward) -lle, to match the rest of the paradigm, such as: -sse. At least one of the forms of the illative case in Estonian are like this: majasse 'into (the) house'. However, it seems that the allative may have a shady history as well, or perhaps it's the lative (or just my knowledge of it) that is questionable.

All that I can see (and I'd have to check resources I currently don't have access to) that is shared in common with these three cases, is a historical association with *-se, that is no longer present in all of the modern cases. Historically, the lative case was supposed to have been *-k, but in some uncertain source, I've seen it described as being -n, also— which could at least explain the pattern of assimilation; it seems more reasonable for -n- + -l- and -n- + -s- to have resulted in -ll- and -ss- in Finnish, than -k- + -l- or -k- + -s-. If someone else stumbles upon this and reads that, tell me what you know!

Clarity?

Despite all this lative/motion toward insanity, there is at least hope overall. Some of the things detailed above don't really pan out yet, just because those cases are too murky. Finding a description of Finnish locative cases that is purely based on Finnish as it is now is somewhat difficult, but the picture is less murky if we bring in details from the language history, or rarer finds in Finnish dialects, or even something from Estonian and South Sámi. Here's a more complete look at the cases:

Hopefully all the yammering about the structure of Finnish case suffixes is of some help. Yes, there is a method to the madness, but it may well be that it results in more madness than before.

__________

Footnotes

* Oddly enough, there seem to be other issues in other balto-finnic languages, where mergers happen between the motion toward category and the static location category. In some dialects of Karelian, for instance, -lla/-llä could either mean 'on/at', or 'onto/toward'.

Posted by:

Ryan