'suomi' -> 'suomEn' but 'ruotsi' -> 'ruotsIn'

[Rob A.]

I too wonder this i - e problem.

Just at Thursday teached differenties of them to one but forgot.

Bad me.

I suppose the way to look at is that native Finnish words do not "want" to end with an "e"....it changes to an "i"....then when a case ending or whatever is added the "e" returns. Those Finnish words that actually do end with "e" ...eg. huone ....are "assumed" by grammarians to have a "ghost" consonant at the end...the silent, invisible reminder of something that once was there and which at some point dropped off.

The exceptions to the "e"/"i" paradigm are most notably obvious foreign words....the other exceptions just have to be committed to memory, I guess ...

[BoxerDanc]

I'm going through the genitive stem right now, so I thought I could relate on this issue too. I'm going to simply memorize this list over time, rather than trying to answer the question "why?" and driving myself crazy. Here it goes:
http://users.jyu.fi/~pamakine/kieli/suo ... eluen.html

[Jukka Aho]

http://users.jyu.fi/~pamakine/kieli/suo ... eluen.html

I object to Mäkinen’s stylistically troubled preference of inflecting siili the way he does (should be siilin in the genitive and siiliä in the partitive)...

Note that the list contains some archaic and old-fashioned words... such as uksi for “door” (ovi in modern Finnish) and lempi for “love” (rakkaus in modern Finnish).

[BoxerDanc]

I also noticed "tuoni" for death (as being archaic, and "kuolema" being modern). As for siili and other words, he gives an explanation below. Anyway, if those imperfections of the list that you pointed out are the only ones, I think it'll be good enough for me.