THE UNIQUENESS OF FINNISH

(A work in progress)

1) Finnish uses vowels that don’t exist in English (as well as more that DO), especially
            y (same as German ü) and ö (same as German ö).

2) Finnish has what’s called phonemic lengthening— stretching out a vowel or consonant makes it, in effect, a different vowel or consonant.

siten (thus) vs. sitten (then)
varmista (Be sure!) vs. varmistaa (to be sure)

pää (head)            -pä (an ending that makes a word emphatic, or indicative of surprise)

3) The syllable stress in Finnish is ALWAYS on the first syllable
(This has clear implications for Finnish poetry and song)

4) Finnish has no future tense

5) The word for “not” acts like a verb in Finnish— you must conjugate it every time you use it
(e.g. hän ei mennyt ‘he didn’t go,’ minä en mennyt ‘I didn’t go,’ sinä et mennyt ‘you [singular] didn’t go.’

6) In comparison with Indo-European languages Finnish uses way more noun endings (case endings, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/finnish-cases.html, and also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finnish_language_noun_cases). In English case endings only remain on pronouns (e.g. he vs. his vs. him, which are nominative, genitive [possessive], and accusative [the case of the direct object or affected thing in the sentence]). The case endings on English nouns washed away like rough edges of a stream rock many centuries ago. There are still about 15 cases in Finnish, almost all of which take a different ending (http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Suomen_kieli_ulkomaalaisille/Sisältö/Objektin_sijan_valinta.)

7) One of the more interesting Finnish noun cases is the partitive. In the case of sentences where some verb indicates some action in relation to an object or “affected thing,” using the partitive case indicates the object is not totally affected.