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I want to add to it that Finnish doesn’t actually have cases. It’s just the equivalent of cases which takes the shape of suffixes. Note that our personal pron
by lynguist 4y ago
I want to add to it that Finnish doesn’t actually have cases.
It’s just the equivalent of cases which takes the shape of suffixes.
Note that our personal pronouns also take the shape of suffixes in Finnish:
taloni (my house)
talossani (in my house)
They’re really not cases.
- LudwigNagasena 4y agoWhy shouldn’t they be considered cases?
- lynguist 4y agoBecause the grammatical case is a morpho-syntactical category of flexion. Suffixes are not inflections.
- LudwigNagasena 4y agoInflection is when the grammatical role of a word is expressed through word formation, eg suffix, prefix, ablaut. Suffixation is a very common way to express inflection in languages.
- canjobear 4y agoI've never encountered this definition of "case" before. In standard descriptive linguistic terminology, these Finnish suffixes are certainly case markers.
- tuukkah 4y agoIn "talossani", there's clearly two suffixes after "talo": -ssa is the suffix that marks the case -ni is the first person possessive suffix (not a case) The first person singular pronoun would be "minä" and its genitive case "minun" - not a suffix but including the suffix -n that marks the genitive case. My house => Minun taloni (the possessive is visible in both words in formal Finnish: the genitive case in the pronoun, the possessive suffix in the noun) My house => Mun talo (less formal Finnish shortens the pronoun and does not use the possessive suffix) The fact that the possessive suffix is not a case does in no way indicate that there wouldn't be actual cases in Finnish. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finnish_noun_cases https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finnish_noun_cases