As I said in the pre­vi­ous ar­ti­cle, I have ded­i­cated a lot of my spare time on learn­ing Finnish. It is by far the most com­plex and weird lan­guage I have ever en­coun­tered. To give you an ex­am­ple, I will ex­plain what are the rules that I need to have in mind to write one word: cheaper.

Let’s start with the ad­jec­tive in the nom­i­na­tive form:

The shirt is cheap: Paita on halpa (Shirt is cheap)

Now, let’s say this shirt is cheaper. To do so, you need to add the suf­fix -mpi to the stem of the word. In the case of halpa, the stem is … halva.

Why did the p be­come a v? Be­cause the stem is in weak form while the nom­i­na­tive case was in strong form. Un­for­tu­nately, Finnish is very in­con­sis­tant and the nom­i­na­tive case and the stem may be in ei­ther the weak or strong form de­pend­ing on … the word type. To go from the strong to the weak form, we need to change p->v, k -> noth­ing, t->d, kk->k, nt->nn, nk->ng,…. The “funny” thing is that there are more word types than I can re­mem­ber, we are talk­ing about ~20 (more in­for­ma­tion here). In the case of halpa, the p just be­comes a v.

Let’s not get al­ready de­pressed by how much we need to learn and keep on mov­ing for­ward with our new word:

The shirt is cheaper: paita on halvempi

Wait, what? Why did the ‘a’ be­come an ‘e’? I thought we just had to add the suf­fix -mpi? Well, you would be right, but there is this lovely rule (that is not ap­plic­a­ble to all the cases), that states that the last let­ter be­fore -mpi should be­come an ‘e’ if it is an ‘a’ or ‘ä’. But be­ware, if you have -aa or -ää, the rule does not ap­ply!

Still fol­low­ing? This was Suomi 3 ma­te­r­ial, but I am now in level 4 and, you know and I am still falling down the rab­bit hole with no end in sight. So, it turns out that ad­jec­tives ex­press­ing a com­par­i­son should also have the same case ap­plied to them as the noun they re­fer to. This is a com­mon rule for ad­jec­tives. For ex­am­ple:

On the shirt: paidalla (the 't' became a 'd' as it went from the strong to week form)(the suffix -lla in Finnish means 'on top of')
On the small shirt: pienellä (pieni = small) paidalla

So, when we want to make a com­par­i­son, we need both the -mpi and the right case ap­plied to it:

On the cheaper shirt: Halvemmalla paidalla

Why did the -mpi be­come -mma? Well, be­cause it would have been too easy, wouldn’t it? In­stead, we need to ask our­selves a few more ques­tions:

• Is the noun plural or sin­gu­lar? WARN­ING: say­ing 400 shirts in Finnish is con­sid­ered as be­ing sin­gu­lar… this was one of the most im­por­tant teach­ing of the third level of Finnish…
• What is the case of the noun? This is im­por­tant to know whether we should use the weak or strong form of the ‘dec­li­na­tion’ of the com­par­i­son.

If the noun is sin­gu­lar, use -mma/-mmä (read up on Finnish’s vo­cal har­mony if you won­der about this) in­stead of -mpi for the weak form and use -mpa/-mpä for the strong form. There are 11 cases in my book right now (15 in re­al­ity), and the strong form is the one needed for the par­ti­ti­ivi (too much ar­gu­ing here with Elisa to ex­plain what it ac­tu­ally is, too com­plex for a paren­the­sis, check out the pre­vi­ous link if you care), il­lati­ivi (get­ting in­side of), es­si­ivi (in the role of). For all the other cases, use the weak form.

If the noun is plural, use -mmi for the weak form and -mpi for the strong form. Yes, the lat­ter case ac­tu­ally makes sense, good! The strong form needs to be used for the same cases as for the sin­gu­lar form … with an ex­tra bonus one, the geneti­ivi (gen­i­tive, the idea of be­long­ing, like the ‘s in Eng­lish).

So, just to fin­ish it up, here is:

On the cheaper shirts: Halvemmilla paidoilla

Trust me, you do NOT want to know why paidalla be­came paidoilla. I have many flow­charts for this, and in the last class, I failed 2 times out of 3…

Here it is, you now know what ques­tions one needs to ask one­self when mak­ing a com­par­i­son in Finnish. I hope I man­aged to con­vey how every­thing has to be in­ter-con­nected and very dif­fi­cult to mas­ter. Now, to my Finnish friends, bear with me un­til this be­comes an au­toma­tism. Un­til then, let’s just stick to Eng­lish ;)

PS: Thanks to Elisa for fix­ing all my mis­takes in all these sim­ple sen­tences!