Adpositions

As you have already noticed, Finnish often uses cases where English would use a preposition, for example "talossa" instead of "in a house". Depending on how you count, English has more than one hundred prepositions but Finnish doesn't have that many cases. There Finnish, too, has prepositions and postpositions, together called adpositions. Most adpositions in Finnish are postpositions, meaning that they come after the word they refer to.

Declination
Adpositions express how things relate to one another. For example, what is the spatial relationship between a cake and a table? Just like the locative cases, Finnish adpositions make a difference between being, going to, and coming from. Some adpositions also have a form which expresses going through. Here is a table of some the adpositions which are used in this section of the course. The course will use most of the forms shown above in the sentences but not all of them. Just like the course will not show every case of a new noun because the case endings are regular, it will not show all the endings of the adpositions because they, too, are mostly regular. To highlight this, we have emphasized the case endings of under and in front of.
 * Kakku on pöydän alla
 * The cake is under the table

Adpositions are frequently used words at the core of the language. They are not easily replaced by borrowing or changed through time. That is why you can see in some words the old Finno-Ugric use of essive (-na), partitive (-kse) and translative (-(t)a) as the cases for being, coming from and going to. It will take some time before we will have an actual look at the essive and the translative. The -tse ending in some words is a case called prolative. This course may never explore prolative because it is almost completely a relic.

Some adpositions do not have any cases (or have only one) because of their meaning