why 'avata' and ' hävitä' have no consonant gradation?

[Lizmc]

avata and hävitä belongs to Type 4 verbs, they are supposed to have gradation from 'v' to 'p', but they dont! Why this is happening? I need some help here.

[Pursuivant]

Because avata is type 1. and hävitä is type 6. verbs?

[Jukka Aho]

Because avata is type 1. and hävitä is type 6. verbs?

Hmm? Kimberli lists them both as type 4:

http://people.uta.fi/~km56049/finnish/type4.html

She also mentions avata doesn’t change:

http://people.uta.fi/~km56049/finnish/porv.html
http://people.uta.fi/~km56049/finnish/consgrad.html

[AldenG]

It is misleading to speak of avata and hävitä (in other words the first infinitive) as the basic forms of the verb to which various changes (like consonant gradation) are applied. Quite conventional and academically "correct," of course, but also quite confusing. You might believe that we also do that in English, but actually we do not.

They do not have gradation because the actual verb from which they are made does not have gradation. That will be obvious if you think of the actual verb instead of the artificial infinitive.

The first infinitive in Finnish is a form from which important information has often been lost already. To compensate for that loss, you have to memorize categories.

In reality the basic form of the verb is the simple imperative (1st person singular imperative). If this is the form you think of and (if you must) you memorize, the rest is usually obvious.

Thus you have avaa, häviä, hakkaa, etc. First off, these are the equivalent of open!, disappear!, and hit! in English (and Finnish). They are surely the first form of each respective verb that ever existed. But more than that, In English they are also first person singular present indicative form and and the infinitive form (after you add "to), and much more. In Finnish, you can always add -n or -t or -mme or -tte to get present indicative forms.

Avaa! Avaa/n jo. (Open! I'm opening already.)
Häviä! Häviä/n jo.
Hakkaa! Hakkaa/n jo.

That's one of the few useful things that hold true in Finnish across all verbs.

From this and further manipulations it becomes apparent that the simple imperative is the basic form of the verb to which various transformations are applied. One of those transformations is to create the first infinitive. In a sense, to make other forms you first go backward from the first infinitive to the simple imperative (aka the "inflectional stem) and then you see what else may need doing.

The rules (if you bothered to invent some) to go from simple imperative to first infinitive are fewer, simpler, and more logical than the rules that have been constructed to go from first infinitive to simple imperative. That's because you have so often already discarded useful information in order to create the first infinitive.

Of course you could call avaa, häviä and hakkaa the "inflectional stem" and it's good to know that term. But at the same time the term is deeply embedded in the idea the the verb itself is avata and you have to do something to it before you use it. That's an ivory tower perspective that does not correspond to the way baby Finns learn and use the language nor to the way the language came into being.

If Rome had not ruled the world at one time, it's quite possible that you would not study infinitives as the center of the universe and the organizing principle of Finnish dictionaries.

But things being as they are, my advice is to forget categories and simply learn pairs or triplets like kerro/kertoa or kerro/kertoo/kertoa. The infinitive is the least important and least frequently used of these two or three forms, so I place it last -- its primary importance is for looking up the verb in the dictionary and even that is something you'll do less and less as you understand more and more context. The forms you want on the tip of you tongue are kerro/n kertoo, kertonut and kertoma/xxx.

Don't memorize rules and descriptions. Memorize examples. Verb triplets are a place to start (but not to stop). The human brain is pre-programmed to follow examples of language and to say new things that are variations of old things. Most people don't get very far in Finnish following the rule-and-description based approach. I did, but I've learned that most people don't. And even for me, the rules-and-descriptions approach was a less productive approach.

[AldenG]

Sorry, that is too complicated an answer and I'm not confident it will help the OP. But it may help somebody else.

Avaa, häviä, hakkaa, and kerro are real things (as verbs). Avata and hävitä and hakata and kertoa are not real things but artificial constructions. In Finnish all first infinitives are artificial constructions invented much later than the real verb.

Study the real things instead of the infinitives and it will be easier to make sense of them. You don't need to learn all that many. A few dozen in the beginning and then a few hundred before you'll no longer be worrying about how verbs are conjugated. You'll recognize what to do with one verb because it will be so close to what you do with another unmistakable cousin of it.

tarvitsen/tarvitsee/tarvita tells you much more about a verb than merely tarvita.

Or tarvitsen/tarvitsee/tarvinnut/tarvita. Studying a list of a few dozen up to a couple of hundred verbs in that form every day will teach you much more and much faster than reading rules about what to do to a verb with -ta on the end. Once you see that -tse- at the end, the rest is simple and automatic with no exceptions or special cases to confuse you. And no confusion with haluta, for instance.

[Sami-Is-Boss]

It helped me, cheers. An interesting alternative...

[Rob A.]

It helped me, cheers. An interesting alternative...

Not really an alternative...Alden explained it rather well... The simplest explanation of all is that similar looking words do not necessarily have similar origins and typically the original word is what will govern the various inflected forms.

However if you, like myself, want to know the "whys and wherefores", then you have to expect it will end up with some long, complex and impossibly arcane explanation. And, yes, blame the Romans. The basic way that languages are usually taught goes back about 1500 years...heck, I think they even adopted their approach from the ancient Greeks....

But there are all sorts of things like this.... why uusi becomes uuden, but lossi becomes lossin...äiti becomes äidin, but lahti becomes lahden....and on and on....

It's not "inconsistency"...in fact, it's the exact opposite...the real reasons are buried deep in the ancient history of the language and for the typical language learner the reasons actually don't really matter.

[AldenG]

But there are all sorts of things like this.... why uusi becomes uuden.

Now don't get me restar-- aw hell, you already did get me restarted.

See, "uusi" IS a great example. And "vesi" as well. Because each is a special simplification of "uude-" or "vede-", innit? Like "innit." The evolution of slang is a lot like the evolution of other contracted or adapted forms. And "uusi" and "vesi" are long-ago modified forms of words whose essence is uude- and vede-. ALL the singular forms EXCEPT nominative have the -de- in them, even if the partitive (uutta, vettä) disguises it a little by a different form of adaptation. In English and Swedish we still have the d/t sound in water or vatten, though it has changed to ss in German Wasser.

It's true (exceptionally) that with this group of noun/adjectives, the nominative singular (uusi, vesi) reappears in most of the plural forms, but that won't be true in all groups.

Because almost none of us has a native language as inflected as Finnish, our brains are pre-programmed to think that the unadorned nominative singular (uusi, vesi) is the basic form of any word. But in Finnish it often is not. The basic form is often hiding among other case forms. And we twist our minds to think, "what do we do to this 'basic' word to get form X?" And we get these Rube Goldberg contrivances of rules to explain it all, because once again, as with the first infinitive of verbs, we're addressing the wrong part of the horse.

The take-home lesson is just to learn and rehearse the genitive and nominative both at once, as in lists of pairs like uuden/uusi, veden/vesi, käden/käsi. (I list genitive first because you'll refer to it much more often.) Sadly those two cases are not quite enough in themselves (how do you remember it becomes uuteen, veteen, käteen?) but learning substantives that way is leaps and bounds beyond having your brain file uusi, vesi, and käsi in isolation, then expecting to know what to do to them.

And I can't emphasize it enough: learn these things by learning groups of example words, not by learning learning rules like "When you see a word with a bifurcated white tail feather, remove part A and substitute part B before adding part C, then go back and change all resulting parts WW to part W and all parts Q to QQ." English Wiktionary is your friend because you don't have to know the 1st infinitive or the nominative to look up a Finnish word. ANY form of the word will do. It's much easier than it used to be to hand-construct whatever kinds of tables you want to practice with. The human brain has a genius for imitating things (especially language and music) that it doesn't necessarily understand. The smart compromise between analysis and imitation is to intelligently construct the patterns one imitates.

[Rob A.]

Yes...vesi is one of those very tantilizing Finnish words for linguists.....In its basic form...vede... is very close to the Russian word for water, voda, and yet apparently it is a thoroughly Finnish...or rather Finno-Ugric, word....it hints at some sort of very ancient connection between Finno-Ugric and Indo-European languages.... yet apparently it just isn't enough by itself for credible linguists to want to go there...

There are other Finnish words that cause one to ponder...the word for hammer seems to come from Farsi....yet it just doesn't seem like a word that would be borrowed...not even from the Russians, let alone from the Persians ... But that's the way it is, apparently....maybe the first hammer in Finland was a ceremonial one from Xerxes himself, or something...

And the German word, Wasser, is interesting. This shift from t to ss included a lot of words and was more a southern German phenomenon...it didn't include Plattdeutsch, Dutch, Frisian, Nordic languages....or English... There are many German words that if it weren't for the ss the word would look much closer to English.... Weiss..."white"; Hass..."hate"; Essen..."eat" ...and interestingly, Gasse...which in German means "lane" or "alleyway" and is equivalent to the English word, "gate"...which in ancient times in English was used for a lane or alley.... And so the Finnish word, katu, is not kassu because the Swedes didn't follow the south German consonant shift about 1500 years ago...

[Jukka Aho]

And so the Finnish word, katu, is not kassu because the Swedes didn't follow the south German consonant shift about 1500 years ago...

Just as a sidenote, in modern Finnish kassu is used as a colloquial shortening of the words kasarmi and kasetti (which are unrelated but the intended meaning should typically be clear from the context.) It is also a common nickname for people named Kalevi or Kalervo (maybe also Kari, Karita, Kaarina, Katariina, Kaisa.)

[AldenG]

There are many German words that if it weren't for the ss the word would look much closer to English.... Weiss..."white"; Hass..."hate"; Essen..."eat" ...and interestingly, Gasse...which in German means "lane" or "alleyway" and is equivalent to the English word, "gate"...which in ancient times in English was used for a lane or alley....

Maybe some influential southern German got his front teeth knocked out by a Viking and thereafter all his t's came out as s. Reminds one of a scene from Life of Brian. Incontinentia -- oh, never mind.

Meanwhile, here are some word pairs from another group:

parhaan/paras
varkaan/varas
reippaan/reipas
varpaan/varvas

The whole process is just so much simpler when you approach it (and rehearse it) this way. Fewer rules, less confusion, and it develops useful reflexes. Because on some level, for a Finn the h or the k or the pp or the p is always there, always inherent to the word, even when omitting it because the word is the subject of the sentence. That's what we need to absorb as second-language speakers of the language.