Wiktionary:About Finnish

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Taxonomy and typology edit

Finnish belongs to the Finnic group of languages, which belongs to the Uralic family. It is an agglutinative language, which falls under the category of synthetic languages.

Pronunciation edit

Main entry: Appendix:Finnish pronunciation

As tone is important to Chinese, rhythm is important to Finnish. Long and short vowels and consonants must be distinguished. This takes place in the same way that phonemes between words are assimilated in English, like “Take care”, “stop point”, “Sara Atkins”, “slippery eel” or “Go overboard”, without glottal stops between words.

Finnish features vowel harmony, so that certain front vowels (ä, ö, y) and back vowels (a, o, u) do not co-occur in native words (except in compounds). There are few consonants, and plosives are unaspirated.

Templates edit

For pronunciation, {{fi-pronunciation}} is available. The template can automatically generate IPA pronunciation, hyphenation and rhyme data, but in some cases, it must be provided with additional info.

  • when a word geminates, use {{fi-pronunciation|*}} (or if other conditions also apply, add a * at the end). some cases include:
    • words of inflection type hame
    • verbs (dictionary form is the first infinitive, which does geminate)
    • some inflected forms (allatives of nouns or adjectives, second person singular imperatives and connegatives of verbs)
    • certain adverbs (particularly -sti, -nne or -tse)
  • compound words; provide the compound word with hyphens between the components, such as {{fi-pronunciation|valta-tie}} for valtatie = valta + tie
  • loanwords where the pronunciation cannot be determined from the spelling alone; give an approximate pronunciation as the parameter, such as {{fi-pronunciation|beisbool}} for baseball (pronounced like beisbool); hyphenation and rhyme info can be provided manually, like {{fi-pronunciation|beisbool|h=base-ball|r=eisboːl}}
  • words in which vowels are separated and not diphthongs as usual: use . between the two vowels, such as {{fi-pronunciation|seesi.um}}
  • ideally also:
    • distinguish between "native" /d/ and "borrowed" /d/ in words; the former (as a weak grade of /t/ in words like sade, voida, taide and tehdas) should be respelled as a capitalized D (saDe, voiDa, taiDe, tehDas), while borrowed /d/ in words like demokratia and diodi should be in lowercase. Apart from this exception, all respelling parameters should be spelled in all lowercase, although manually provided hyphenation needs to provide the correct capitalization.
    • distinguish between "borrowed" /ts/ (in e.g. pizza) as opposed to "native" /ts/ (in e.g. metsä) by marking the former as t#s
      • the weak grade of the "native" /ts/ can be marked as t!s

To add audio pronunciations or more advanced info, please see the template documentation for help.

If you are not sure whether you can input this information correctly, you should use {{rfp|fi}} instead.

Etymology edit

Compounds and affixes edit

The format for compound words and affixes conforms to WT:ETY, but Finnish has some morphological features that need attention.

Suffixes edit

To get suffixed words in the appropriate categories, such as [[Category:Finnish terms suffixed with -ton]] contributors can use the template {{suffix|fi}}.

{{suffix|fi|elo|ton}}elo +‎ -ton

Many Finnish words end with more than one suffix. One should refer words to the word they are directly derived from, if one exists. Notice that the parts are shown in their lemma forms, even if they change when integrated together, as in the case of elottomuus:

{{suffix|fi|eloton|uus}}eloton +‎ -uus

However, if needed, multiple suffixes can be appended by using {{affix}} (or {{af}}); for example,

{{affix|fi|elo|-ton|-uus}}elo +‎ -ton +‎ -uus
Vowel harmony edit

Several Finnish suffixes exist as two vowel-harmonic variants. To avoid duplicating content and to keep instances of the suffix in one and the same category, back-harmonic allomorphs (suffixes with any of the vowels a o u) are treated as "default". Front-harmonic allomorphs (suffixes with any of the vowels y ä ö) should be linked to their back-harmonic counterpart. This should happen automatically, but in case it fails, it is easiest achieved with the alt2 parameter:

{{suffix|fi|isä|ton|alt2=tön}}isä +‎ -tön

Prefixes edit

To get prefixed words in the appropriate categories, such as [[Category:Finnish terms prefixed with epä-]] contributors can use the template {{prefix|fi}}.

{{prefix|fi|epä|itsekäs}}epä- +‎ itsekäs

Compounds edit

To get compound words into [[Category:Finnish compound terms]] contributors can use the template {{compound|fi}}.

{{compound|fi|ammatti|kieli|t1=profession|t2=language}}ammatti (profession) +‎ kieli (language)

Glosses edit

Glosses, if shown, should be shown

  • after each part
  • inside round brackets, inside double quotation marks
  • unitalicized

This appearance can be produced with {{m}}.

{{m|fi||ammatti||profession}}ammatti (profession)

Inflection edit

Inflection goes under inflection headings such as ====Conjugation==== and ====Declension====. Inflection templates are available for Finnish words. Nominals, which include nouns, adjectives, and adverbs, are declined. Verbs are conjugated. Use the inflection templates found under: Appendix:Finnish conjugation types and Appendix:Finnish declension types. For example:

====Conjugation====
{{fi-conj-sanoa|san|||o|a}}

For adjectives, the parameter |pos=adj should be used with declension templates:

====Declension====
{{fi-decl-korkea|pos=adj|korke|a}}

Part-of-speech edit

The part-of-speech section goes under a part-of-speech heading, such as ===Verb===. Use {{fi-noun}}, {{fi-verb}}, {{fi-adj}}, {{fi-adv}}, etc., or {{head}}. Do not indicate inflection types in the inflection parameters of the part-of-speech templates; use the inflection templates in the inflection sections instead.

===Verb===
{{fi-verb}}

Default lemma edit

Since Finnish words can have hundreds of possible inflections, they are organised under lemmas, or headwords. Finnish words are inflected as either nominals or verbs, and the lemmas for each are:

  • Nominals, including nouns, adjectives, and adverbs- the nominal singular.
  • Verbs- the first infinitive.

In all cases, entries for non-lemma forms should use the appropriate variant of the {{inflection of}} template to link to the lemma. Example:

==Finnish==

===Noun===
{{head|fi|noun form}}

# {{inflection of|fi|pöytä||nom|p}}

Dialects edit

Finnish has many dialects for such a relatively small group of people. However, there is only one standard form. Dialectal entries are listed under the ==Finnish== heading as normal, and their status as dialectal should be marked using the template {{lb}}. {{fi-dial}} can be used for dialect data.

The varieties of Finnish are a part of a dialect continuum with its closest relatives, especially Karelian and Ingrian, and neighboring varieties of these will be mutually intelligible with varieties of Finnish. Regardless, in Wiktionary, these languages are treated as stand-alone languages and given their own headings, such as ==Karelian==. For a list of closely related languages recognized by Wiktionary, see Category:Finnic languages.

Labels edit

As with the rest of the languages, {{lb}} is used for sense-specific labels and {{tlb}} for headword-specific labels (also when the label applies to all senses in a list, but {{tlb}} templates should not be repeated in the same list). Dialect areas (including Western and Eastern Finnish) can be used as labels.

Anagrams edit

Anagrams conform to Wiktionary:Anagrams and are usually added by a bot. Spaces and punctuation are ignored. Ä, Ö, and Å are unique letters that are not interchangeable with plain letters.

Characters edit

In standard Finnish, the apostrophe is officially encoded as (U+2019 RIGHT SINGLE QUOTATION MARK). However, Wiktionary currently normalizes the apostrophes as ' (U+0027 APOSTROPHE) in entry names. The conversion should be done automatically with links, so either can be used in the page source.

References edit

See Appendix:Finnish bibliography.

Sample entry edit

==Finnish==

===Etymology===
{{compound|fi|sana|kirja|t1=word|t2=book}}; a {{calque|nocap=1|fi|sv|ordbok}}.

===Pronunciation===
{{fi-pronunciation|sana-kirja}}

===Noun===
{{fi-noun}}

# [[dictionary]]
#: {{ux|fi|Wikisanakirja on vapaa '''sanakirja'''.|Wiktionary is a free '''dictionary'''.}}

====Declension====
{{fi-decl-kala|sanakirj|||a}}

See also edit