Notes on Finnish grammar and morphology

If you know perl or similar languages, the notation should be almost all obvious, apart from that I use + for word concatenation (with spaces if used in that language) and ++ for concatenation to make a word. Otherwise, see notes on my metasyntactic notation.

Definitions

Consonant Gradation

To do next: put letter classes in here, like for Irish; think first about whether condition or form should go on the left, possibly switch the table for Irish over. Name the sections of this table, as I've done for Irish.


Consonant	Graded form
<([:Letter:]+)t([:Vowel:]*)>	1 ++ d ++ 2
<([:Letter:]+)k([:Vowel:]*)>	1 ++ 2
<([:Letter:]+)tt([:Vowel:]*)>	1 ++ t ++ 2
<([:Letter:]+)kk([:Vowel:]*)>	1 ++ k ++ 2
<([:Letter:]+)pp([:Vowel:]*)>	1 ++ p ++ 2
<([:Letter:]+)nk([:Vowel:]*)>	1 ++ ng ++ 2
<([:Letter:]+)nt([:Vowel:]*)>	1 ++ nn ++ 2

Note: I am an amateur enthusiast about languages, and not a linguist. I don't know this language in depth, and these notes have come entirely or almost entirely from learning from books. I made these notes for my convenience, because I don't like ploughing through the verbiage around the actual information in typical language books; I've put them here in case others with the same preference find them useful.

I'd very much welcome corrections and clarifications, especially from native speakers.

If you want a definitive answer on something, you should find someone who knows the language properly!

John C. G. Sturdy

Last modified: Wed Sep 12 22:08:12 IST 2007