Hydro wrote:EP wrote:What is the weak\strong vowel stem - how do I find it, etc.
That really sounds difficult. I have never learned grammatical terms (except simple ones like subject and object and adjective and substantive). I would not know a weak vowel stem from a strong one. And that concerns all the languages I know at least to some degree (seven of them alltogether).
Is it really necessary to study Finnish in that fashion? I suppose age is a factor, but would it be possible to try to learn the way children learn? They know nothing of grammar, and they get it right.
And how do children learn, exactly?
And from all the posts I've recieved - most of you seem to misunderstand me.
I'm trying to understand what a stem
is, and how do I
recognize or
find it.
Sorry for the confusion.
From a layperson's viewpoint; stem = vartalo (body) of the word... it's the root, the bit that doesn't change much in English, but does in Finnish by the kpt changes.
How do you recognise it? Practice.
It's something you just get a feel for. If you know what endings can go on a word, just remove them and work back.
As a good fallback, if you are totally lost, use this tool
http://www2.lingsoft.fi/cgi-bin/fintwol
Put in your word and it strips off the endings and shows the basic form (stem?) and tells you what suffixes were in your word to start with.
e.g. Porissa, you know that -ssa means in a place... take that away and you have Pori remaining, I don't know if that's really what linguists call the stem?
It gets more complicated when there is a kpt change e.g. if you read puvun... you have to recognize that after the n is gone, the stem doesn't have a v, but a k ... puvun comes from puku.
I kind of know the rules for kpt changes, but if you ask me is it in weak or strong form? I would not have a clue. I am a bad student!