Finnish Grammar Gothic
- There are 14, 15 or 16 cases, depending on who you ask. One might be accusative. Accusative may not exist at all. It depends on who you ask. Who do you ask? You don’t know who to ask. You can ask nobody. The accusative case stares at you, accusingly.
- Imperative exists in three persons. Which three persons, you ask. Plural, they reply. Don’t forget the plural imperative. You stare at your textbook. Your textbook stares back at you. The negative active 2. person imperative has ceased to make any sense. Has it ever made sense?
- You’re learning the difference between the short and the long vowels. The short vowels are short. The long ones are twice as long as the short ones. But really, they say, they’re thrice as long as that. Even longer than that. Ä, you say. Ää. Äää. Äääääääääää- It never stops.
- The verb types are easy, they say. There are only six verb types. Six. Your text book lists only five. What is the sixth verb type? It’s in the next book, your professor says. There is no next book. What is the sixth verb type?
- The vowels come in groups. You don’t know why they’ve come or why they’re in groups. You learn their harmony all the same. You shed a tear when you’ve mastered it. But have you mastered it? The vowel harmony lulls you into a false sense of security. The vowels will strike when you least expect it.
- Consonant gradation.
- There is no accusative, your professor screams at you. It’s genitive! Or partitive! Or plural nominative, but only in the personal pronouns! The accusative does not exist! He is red in the face. Why does the accusative not exist? Do grammatical objects not exist in this language? you ask. (You shouldn’t have asked.) You are met with blank stares.
- In the future you would like to speak Finnish fluently. You make the mistake of saying this aloud. The ground opens beneath your feet and a terrible voice booms: THERE IS NO FUTURE! Silly you, you think. Of course there isn’t. You dutifully note down the three different past tenses.
- Sentence replacements replace sentences, your professor tells you. He does not tell you what the sentences are replaced with. You stare at the list of sentence replacements. There are nine items on the list. One is a quantum sentence replacement. You dare not ask.
- New words are easy to create, they say. So easy. What could possibly go wrong? You decide to create a new word. You have created an abomination.
- You’re conjugating -i nouns. There’s another group of -i nouns conjugated differently. These are very old words, your professor says. There’s another group of -i nouns. These are very old words, she says. Even older words. There’s another group of -i nouns. These are very old words, she says. They are ancient words. Blood and devil words, the past whispers in your ear.
- Some of those 14 or 15 or 16 cases are fossilised, so don’t worry about them, your professor says. Don’t worry at all. But you worry. You must worry.
- You watch a video on facebook. The Most Important Word In Finnish, it’s called. It becomes clear that it is possible to carry entire conversations using only this one word. Your smile stiffens on your face. There is only one word. There has only ever been one word.
jumalauta i’ve had so many finnish teachers but yet to meet the one who’d dare to question the existence of the accusative.
my first Finnish professor brought it up offhandedly but didn’t go into too much detail about it, and my second Finnish professor stuck to the existence of accusative. 😅 I’m not entirely sure why tbh but she once said that because x case was no longer productive it was really a case anymore, and that’s exactly the argument *I* use to justify that accusative doesn’t exist - even if it did, once, and had endings that look interchangeable with, other case endings, a) the personal pronouns are fixed and don’t get conjugated the same way other nouns do, so they’re “exempt” from the general rules b) “accusative case endings” can be explained with properties of other case endings and their grammatical function, e.g. the difference in meaning when an object has a genitive case ending to partitive case ending (luen kirjan vs luen kirjaa), c) the main reason why accusative exists in Finnish is because Swedish and German linguists said so in the 19th century, and since accusative is very much the object case in Germanic (and Romance? idk) languages, it’s understandable that they went looking for it, found a mess, and declared it so, instead of considering that maybe the Finnish object behaves differently and that there’s no use for accusative in the “traditional” sense. there’s a history of early non-finnic/samic/Uralic linguists forcing those languages into boxes, something that has severely affected both how those languages are taught in their own communities and further linguistic research in them. A lot of that damage still hasn’t been undone.
