Learn Finnish Abbreviations and symbols
Abbreviations and symbols
Abbreviations
The names of the cases are always abbreviated with upper case let
ters, as follows:
ABL. Ablative
ACC. Accusative
ADE. Adessive
ALL. Allative
ELA. Elative
ESS. Essive
G. Genitive
ILL. Illative
INE. Inessive
N. Nominative
P. Partitive
PRO. Prolative
TRA. Translative
Singular and plural are indicated by a preposed lower case s or p,e.g. SG genitive singular, pILL plural illative.
The codes s1 s2 s3 p1 p2 p3 refer to first, second, and third per
sons singular and plural.
Other abbreviations:
ac. active
adj. adjective
adv. adverb
cd. conditional
cj conjunction
dir directive
ind. indefinite (subject person)
inf. infinitive
itr. intransitive
pass. passive (participle)
pn PP. potential
ps. postposition/preposition.
Examples:
s1 pt first person singular past, e.g. mä menlijn 'I went' s2 pINE second person singular form of plural inessive, e.g. taskulissalsi 'in your pockets'
Symbols
I (upright line) is used to separate the morphemes, i.e. the minimal meaningful units, of words, e.g. English 'treels', 'friendliness', Finnish puult, ystävälislyys. To help you to distinguish derivational suffixes, which make words from words, an equals sign will be used: see Unit 1 for your first set of examples.
+ separates the members of a compound, e.g. English 'apple'+'tree',
'sun'+'set', Finnish omena+puu, auringoln+laskju (sunl's+settling'). > In grammatical sections, stands for changes to' or 'is read as', for example, pp > p formulates the change from pp in kauppa 'shop' to p in kaupaln 'of the shop'.
in vocabulary sections, refers the reader to the standard, literary Finnish form, for example, the notation paljoks > paljonko 'how much?' indicates that the standard, literary Finnish form corres ponding to colloquial paljoks is paljonko.
A, O, U are used to capture regular correspondences between vowels due to vowel harmony, for example, O stands for o or ö, and U stands for u and y.
E, K, T, and other upper case letters signal morpheme-specific alternations between certain pairs of sounds, for example, both t and e alternate with zero in the inflexion of the word for 'beer': SN olut, SG olueln. The shape of this word can thus be formulated as oluTE. You'll learn more about how all this works gradually as you work your way through the book.
