Inessive/illative

[tas]

Hi,

I have some questions about these two inessive and illative.
I read that inessive means inside something, like talossa.
What about verbs like nukkumassa? Wiktionary says in a state of sleep(asleep), which makes sense, but what about ostamassa?
I wonder the same about nukkumaan in illative = into something, like kotiin, but what does this make for nukkumaan?
Go to sleep = mene nukkumaan? Go and buy = mene ostamaan?

If those last two are correct, what about ostamassa?

thanks!

[007]

Hi,

I have some questions about these two inessive and illative.
I read that inessive means inside something, like talossa.
What about verbs like nukkumassa? Wiktionary says in a state of sleep(asleep), which makes sense, but what about ostamassa?
I wonder the same about nukkumaan in illative = into something, like kotiin, but what does this make for nukkumaan?
Go to sleep = mene nukkumaan? Go and buy = mene ostamaan?

If those last two are correct, what about ostamassa?

thanks!

Nukku + ma+ ssa = sleeping (noun)
sleep + gerund (to be -ing) + Inessive case

nukku + ma + an = sleeping (noun)
sleep + gerund (to be -ing) + illative case

which is slightly different from talossa (talo + ssa) as there's an absence of infinitive (ma) in it. Same with kotiin. Don't now try to add 'ma' and create a 'talomassa'

for further explanation, http://www.uusikielemme.fi/infinitives3.html & http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finnish_gr ... infinitive

from wiki

Note that the '-ma' form without a case ending is called the 'agent participle'

e.g. Hänen tekemä .....

[007]

Go to sleep = mene nukkumaan? Go and buy = mene ostamaan?

If those last two are correct, what about ostamassa?

thanks!

Go to sleep (go 'for the sake of or with the intention of, something like that' sleeping) = mene nukkumaan
Go and buy = mene ja osta? or simply mene ostamaan? me not so confident in this.

[Pursuivant]

Yes, it can be used.

Mene/menen ostamaan...

[AldenG]

There's no magical essence of essive or inessive or adessive such that if you study some rules enough, you'll thereafter know "why"and when one says, for instance, tänä päivänä (and therefore tänään)(also huomenna), but tällä/ensi/viime viikolla (and yet kolme kertaa viikossa), but tässä/ensi/viime kuussa, and then again tänä/ensi/viime vuonna. There just isn't. All three cases occur (among many other places) in time expressions, and usually only one of them is right. And 99% of the time people who try to tell you "why" it's a certain way are just making !"#¤% up. Maybe Agricola wanted to be fair to three parts of Finland, each of which consistently used one of those cases for all instances. I don't know that for a fact, don't happen to believe it, but it shows how easy it is to make !"#¤% up. It's like dissecting a bullfrog to figure out why it wants to @#$% the frog on the lily pad to its right instead of the pad to its left. You'll never find the reason for that. It doesn't reside in any particular place, and least of all in the tiniest anatomical pieces of that frog.

I've concluded that anything more than about 2 full days studying case meanings in isolation, just to get a sense of what they are, what they look like, and some of the ways they're used, is a waste of your time. For so many learners it becomes a highly seductive dead end. It's not unlike a seminary student getting caught up in studying the names of archangels and their areas of oversight. Obviously you'll be learning how to form certain cases, particularly illative, out of various types of words for quite some time beyond that. But don't let it distract you from the truly critical work of learning related expressions in context, for instance expressions for when things happen. A large number of the most common expressions in Finnish are words and brief word combinations you would never, ever correctly guess from first principles or from studying cases in isolation. Ask a Finn on the street to explain why "taha" appears in mikä tahansa auto or hän teki sen tahallaan, and why both have a possessive ending -- or even what "taha" means by itself. They'll get annoyed about such questions. The expressions simply mean what they mean.

So get a Finn to fill you two pages of sentences and substitutions stating, asking, and answering when something will happen, did happen, does happen regularly. Then study them in whole sentences and phrases. Nobody, least of all a native speaker, builds sentences one word and case-ending at a time. All these things "bubble up" (on demand through the language-mind) as multi-word expressions that good speakers know how to connect together and substitute words into. Your most important vocabulary in Finnish is your vocabulary of expressions. The tiniest-pieces approach is absolutely the hardest, most confusing, and most error-prone way to learn Finnish.

Similarly with -ma you can read a page or two of some book about what a cool kind of infinitive it is and how it's different from the other [s]archangels[/s] infinitives, or you can get someone to make you an exercise with a couple of dozen verbs to practice the paradigm:

Lähdin (uimaan)(pyöräilemään)(ostamaan ruokaa)/jne.
Kävin (uimassa)(pyöräilemässä)(ostamassa ruokaa)/jne.
Tulin (uimasta)(pyöräilemästä)(ostamasta ruokaa)/jne.

And practice statements, questions, and answers around that paradigm for an hour or two. Maybe mix them in with a few places names (which lack the -ma, obviously). After that, you'll never see anything very remarkable about that -ma again, and you certainly won't understand why any curriculum designer in their right mind would stuff it as an advanced topic into the final rushed week of a course, considering it's one of the easiest forms in the language to understand and to use, and something that you hear around you every single day. You won't need to know what it's called. I bet more than 90% of people who speak Finnish fluently can't correctly tell you what it's called. They don't need to, because they know how to use the damn thing.

Make one set of verbs for the initial position and another set for the -ma forms. For that handful of initial verbs, learn once and forever which -ma form to use with it. You're looking for the most common vanilla examples, not the ambiguous, wacky or confounding ones that some people love to give you to show how special they are or how hard the language is. You should always learn (or teach) a clear and simple paradigm at first, elaborating and adding exceptions only later if they are appropriate at all. Many verbs you can use this way have alternate shorter forms, and eventually you'll want to know those. Just don't let them distract you from the model. You will pick up the finesses effortlessly once you have learned the basics to the level of reflex.

Lather, rinse, repeat. Maybe a week later do exercises on words like laulamalla. That's another easy one although not nearly as common and therefore a little harder to come up with examples for.

And later still you could do a few exercises about forms like Hannun rakentama talo (since not long ago he was taloa rakentamassa), and then you know the other main usage of -ma.

And someday you'll come across -maisillani etc and you'll think "oh, there's that -ma piece again." (Or is it, really? But who cares?) As long as you know the meaning of the actual form ( [my] being on the verge of doing what the verb says), you're not going to care about the deep parsing -- which, again in this case, can't actually explain it; it just means what it means, like a bid of 3 clubs in Bridge. You'll have a sense by then of the pieces you often see, but the meaning isn't in the pieces -- it's in the often arbitrary combinations of pieces, and it's right there on the surface. Just learn to associate the combination of syllables with the meaning, because I guarantee you that is all that most fluent speakers of Finnish do.

Learn the forms one at a time by example. Forget deep explanations. Just focus on the surface like the millions who use this language successfully do, and like the handful who learn it quickly as a second language do. Most courses want to teach grammar. But most students want to learn comprehension and production. That's a different skill set requiring a different approach to learn.

[Rob A.]

I should have read this thread before posting on the other one dealing with the third infinitive....

But, yeah, other than for passing exams, you should only chase down this grammar stuff if you are interested in it. Other than the basics, you don't need it to actually learn the language. With Finnish, as limited as my knowledge still is, things just pop into my head when I want to say something...not always correct, but surprisingly often, pretty close. A conjugation table or a declension table never seems to pop into my head, though ...Go figure!!!

...and it's the same with French...my French isn't all that great either, though it's still much better than my Finnish.

But, I still like the analytical thrill of trying to figure out how the language works. It's kind of interesting knowing things such as that the Finnish word for, "horse", comes orginally from Greek....that the Finnish word for, "street" is related to the English word for, "gate". That if you see an "s" near the end of a Finnish word, that probably means that in ancient times there may have been a "t" there, ....that Finnish words ending in "e" are "unnatural" in that there was once a consonant there and that the declension of the word in modern Finnish will very likely reflect this ancient, "ghost" consonant.... Blah, blah, blah....