Posession and colours

Genitive case
The primary use of the genitive case is to express ownership. The owner is placed before the owned thing, always. In that way the Finnish construction is similar to the English possessive which uses "’s". A genitive construction with ’of’ is not needed in Finnish.

In Finnish, there is really no limit how many genitives you can put after another. Naapurin lapsen opettajan koiran turkin trimmauksen hinta (the price of the fur trimming for the teacher of the neighbour's child) may not be a pretty sentence but there it is.

The genitive case ending is -N. This is added to the weak stem of the word in a similar way that -T is added to the weak stem to make the plural.

To have (and to hold)
Unlike most Indo-Europian languages, the Uralic language group does not take use of the verb to have. Instead in Finnish you say that there is something on/at you. To express this we use the adessive case (latin ad = at; latin esse = to be).

The case ending of adessige is -lla/-llä. The case ending is added to the same stem which the genitive uses.

Grammatically, the subject of the sentence is the things which are owned. The subject is in nominative in singular and in nominative or partitive in plural. Nominative is used to show that someone or something has all of something instead of a part or an unspecified number of something. For the latter, you use the partitive.

However, if the sentence is in negative, that is if someone doesn't have something, then the subject is always in partitive.

The verb olla is always in singular: on/ei ole.

Possessive pronouns
Separate possessive pronouns – like my, your, his, her etc – is something that Finnish doesn't use. Instead Finnish uses the genitive forms of personal pronouns. You may recall that you can leave out the pronoun as a subject in first and second person. You can also leave out the respective posessive pronouns. The same form, genitive of the personal pronoun, is used both as an attribute (like for example my) and alone (like for example mine).

Possessive suffix
The posessive suffix is a little something that is added to the end of a word when it is preceded by a genitive personal pronoun ("posessive pronoun"). Note, that you only add a possessive suffix at the end of the things which are owned and not their attributes such an adjective which becomes before a noun.

There are three rules regarding how to add the posessive pronoun.
 * 1) You add it to the strong stem
 * 2) You remove any possible -t or -n at the end of the word before adding the suffix. That is why sigular nominative, singular genitive and plural nominative always look the same. For example in the table above, you could also have my dogs, your dogs etc. in the English column.
 * 3) Third person singular and plurar are -nsa in nominative, genitive and illative. In other cases you double the last vowel and add -n at the end.

The rules in action
My wolf The colour of my wolf I look at his wolf
 * 1) minun + susi + ni
 * 2) weak stem of susi is sude- (for example in sudet, wolves)
 * 3) the strong stem is sute-
 * 4) minun suteni
 * 1) minun + susi + genitive + ni + väri
 * 2) the genitive of susi is suden
 * 3) with the strong stem you have suten
 * 4) remove -n at the end of the word before adding suffix
 * 5) minun suteni väri
 * 1) minä katson + hänen + susi + nsa
 * 2) the partitive of susi is sutta
 * 3) with partitive you don't use -nsa but vowel lengthening and -n: suttaan
 * 4) minä katson hänen suttaan

Posessive suffix in real life
In spoken Finnish the possessive suffix is used only rarely. Most often people use just the genitive pronoun and leave the suffix out altogether. You would therefore usually say "minun susi" (or "mun susi" or "miun susi"), "minun suden väri"  and "minä katson hänen sutta". Although the spoken language uses these forms almost exclusevily this course does not accept them because you need to be able to understand the posessive suffix when it is used by news sites, news readers, official documents etc.

Colours
This section will also teach you words for colours. We will use the adjectives independently, as predicates, meaning that between the subject and the adjective, there is the verb to be.

In singular: In plural: We will also use adjectives as attributes which means that they come before the thing they describe. In that case the case of the adjective is always the same as the case of the noun.
 * nominative
 * partitive
 * partitive
 * examples