help with using a book

[obakesan]

Hi

Every book I pick up on Finnish has its flaws, as it happens I am more comfortable with Kuulostaa Hyvältä than anything I've picked up yet.

None the less it suffers from requiring the reader to mind read the author. So if anyone can help me I'm trying work out what the author means with lists of vocab like:

1aikaa
2 ajan
3 aikaan
4 ajoissa
5 aikoja
6 aikojen

As well I'm not sure what the abbreviation "subst" means (beside the word aika)
Some of e abbreviations are clear: propr = proper noun, interj = interjection , adj ....

Thanks

[Jukka Aho]

As well I'm not sure what the abbreviation "subst" means (beside the word aika)

The Finnish grammatical term for “noun” is substantiivi. (See: substantive.)

Sorry, I have no idea what the numbers in that numbered list (or the selection of cases in it) are supposed to denote.

[obakesan]

Thanks

I often spend more time working out what these wankers want than actually studying!

Actually the books are soooooo frustrating that I want to meet with the authors and ask why did you not just explain yourself? Why mix Finnish that is complex in with a beginners book?

[jahasjahas]

Does the book provide that same list of six word forms for every noun?

The aika example has
1 singular partitive
2 singular genitive
3 singular illative
4 plural inessive
5 plural partitive
6 plural genitive

As a native speaker who has never had to learn any declension tables by heart, I can't comment on why this would be a good way of describing a word's declension. Maybe it is.

[Rekkari]

I think the purpose of the list might be to show a sampling of the declension of aika, and words of that type (e.g., kirja, kana, lahja, paita, rauha, etc.) These are two-syllable words that end in the letter 'a' and have a vowel other than 'o' or 'u' in the first syllable. Finnish has a limited number of word types, and each type follows a pattern that you'll come to recognize. I was taught that only the genitive singular and both partitives (singular and plural) are needed to figure out how to form all the cases, so aikaan and ajoissa in your list are probably redundant. If you remember aika, aikaa, ajan, aikoja, you'll know to deal with a new word of that type when you come across it. The word paita, for example, would be paita, paitaa, paidan, paitoja. From those base forms you can then derive paitani, paidatta, paitoihin, paidasta, padoilta, paitojen, etc.

[kalmisto]

See this also ! : http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/aika

[AldenG]

I was taught that only the genitive singular and both partitives (singular and plural) are needed to figure out how to form all the cases, so aikaan and ajoissa in your list are probably redundant.

If your brain is a computer, that's probably true. Every author differs about how many forms are enough to show you at a glance all the distinctive inflectional properties of a word class. It's well known in any case that the human brain is far, far better at visual recognition and at imitation, even of things it doesn't fully understand, than it is at applying a sequence of abstract rules. So looking at it from a practical perspective, showing a few redundant cases will reduce errors and confusion compared to showing the bare minimum that "ought to be enough for any intelligent person" to work out the rest.

Offhand, the list obakesan shows looks like it may be the one that KOTUS (Kotimaisten kielten keskus - Institute for the Language of Finland) uses to fully characterize nouns. In any event it's about the same length. Before Wiktionary, the KOTUS list was the most comprehensive online list of Finnish words, each one with one or more numeric inflectional labels that (with a little of the intelligence I mentioned above) is/are enough to derive all its forms correctly.

[AldenG]

On further inspection, it is not the identical paradigm but seems constructed on the same principle. Here's an example from the KOTUS list:

valo
valon
valoa
valoon
valot
valojen
valoja
valoihin

This list includes nominative singular and plural and it's in a different order. Otherwise it differs only in using valoihin / aikoihin instead of valoissa / ajoissa. There's real value in distilling a large paradigm into a smaller paradigm; the question is always which subset will be most helpful and still be sufficient.

You can see more here:

Nykysuomen sanalista

Inflectional types

Gradation types

[obakesan]

Does the book provide that same list of six word forms for every noun?

It does

The aika example has
1 singular partitive
2 singular genitive
3 singular illative
4 plural inessive
5 plural partitive
6 plural genitive

Thank you

As a native speaker who has never had to learn any declension tables by heart, I can't comment on why this would be a good way of describing a word's declension. Maybe it is.

Well I wish I was a native speaker right now!

As a native English speaker grammar was not taught much, so this is hard going for me.

[obakesan]

Every author differs about how many forms are enough to show

Some mention of what the list *was* would have been nice

Offhand, the list obakesan shows looks like it may be the one that KOTUS (Kotimaisten kielten keskus - Institute for the Language of Finland) uses to fully characterize nouns.

The book is Kuulostaa Hyvältä and was produced in the Finnish Language Unit of the university of Amsterdam. Some blame also is directed towards the University of Helsinki.

No apology is given to the students who suffered her classes.

[obakesan]

Thank you all for your helpful and informative answers.

In will attempt to repay your kindness with diligent study.

[Jukka Aho]

Thank you all for your helpful and informative answers.

In will attempt to repay your kindness with diligent study.

A kidney will do.

[Upphew]

Thank you all for your helpful and informative answers.

In will attempt to repay your kindness with diligent study.

A kidney will do.

I prefer liver after the summer...

[Rekkari]

On further inspection, it is not the identical paradigm but seems constructed on the same principle.

Your're right, valo declines almost identically to aika, but not exactly. I recognize it as a auto-type word (ends in o, u, ö, or y), and the difference is that the partitive plural is formed simply by adding -ja. The aika-type words ('officially' a kirja-type word per Finnish for Foreigners) require changing the final a to o before adding -ja to the genitive stem. Actually, aika is a little strange - k disappears as it should according to consonant gradation but the i morphs to a j: ajan instead of aian.

There's real value in distilling a large paradigm into a smaller paradigm; the question is always which subset will be most helpful and still be sufficient.

Absolutely agree. I just looked at KOTUS and there are like, 50+ different paradigms! I learned probably fewer than two dozen types in Finnish for Foreigners, but they seem to cover the bases just as completely as KOTUS. It appears that the word types that I learned, while possibly a bit more complex, are sufficient. KOTUS has two or three models where I have just one.

I have anything but a computer-like mind, but I am somewhat analytical and have an unsettling urge to know why things are done in a particular way. At this point, I've learned to recognize most of the word types along with their associated patterns to the point where violations like kirjia and paitia actually sound wrong. And when I accidentally invent a "new" Finnish word when trying to express myself because my vocabulary is still limited, at least I'll get the endings correct!

BTW, my primer on Finnish grammar was Finnish for Foreigners, which I found to be pretty good at explaining the why's and how's of the language. Boring and dated lesson topics, though - the book really could use an update.

[AldenG]

Sounds like you've taught yourself a lot.

My only point with valo was that it was a similar sampling, not the same inflection class.

I've said elsewhere that I think it helps people a lot to think of nominative not as the "real" form of the word and all the other cases as manipulations, but to think of the stem in the genitive as the real form of the word and everything else (including nominative) as manipulations of that. I think that also reflects the evolutionary reality. The nominative is the most likely to have had its rough edges worn off by constant use and thus least likely to be truly representative of the word's behavior on the whole.

Of course from most languages' point of view that's not always an easy adjustment of perspective for people to make. But there's often more information in the genitive form. And in words with a lot of spelling changes, the other cases are more predictable from the genitive. Of course it still requires a sampling of cases to correctly differentiate a noun's or adjective's behavior.

It's even clearer with verbs. The form I think people should concentrate on is the simple imperative and most especially not the infinitive. If you know tule, kerro, anna, etc., not only do you know many other parts of the conjugation already, but it's also easier to predict all the changes required for constructing other forms than it is if you recognize the verb primarily by its infinitive. It's simpler to predict the infinitive from that form than to predict that form from the infinitive. Here again I think it's reflecting an evolutionary reality that this was the first kind of verb to exist, the form around which all the others were eventually built. It also happens to be what babies learn first.