Food

Syödä & juoda
In the previous section, you learned the verb types 1, 3, and 4. Here you learn two verbs of the 2nd type: syödä, to eat, and juoda, to drink. The stem of the 2nd type is easily created by removing the end -da/-dä. The personal endings are the same in other verb types. As with type 4, you don't add any ending to the third person singular because the word already ends in two vowels in the same syllable (a diphtong or a long vowel).

Singular and plural partitive as objects
We are now going to take a closer look at the partitive in both singular and plural. In the last section we already used the plural partitive as the predicative of the sentence (that is, with the verb olla, to be). We will continue doing that but we will also use the partitive as a grammatical case of the object.
 * Minä juon kahvia - I am drinking coffee (coffee is the object of drinking)
 * Minä syön appelsiineja - I am eating oranges (oranges are the object of eating)

Singular
In singular, the partitive is pretty simple. The case ending is either -a/-ä or -ta/-tä. The first is more common but the latter is used used in many common nouns, adjectives and numerals. To put it simply, the rule is to use


 * -a/-ä; except that you use


 * -ta/-tä when: the stem of the word ends in a long vowel or diphthong or a consonant. Examples of the latter case are mies:mie s tä, nainen:nai s ta, tee:t ee tä.

The partitive is always added to the strong body if the word has consonant gradation.

Plural
The partitive case endings are the same in plural as in the singular. This rule comes with a big but: but you need to add the plural marker before the case ending. The plural marker in Finnish is -i-, so the plural partitive has two endings:


 * -ia/-iä; or -ja/jä when the -i- is squeezed between two vowels

An additional but the otherwise simple ruler of the plural partitive is that the plural marker, -i-, can cause the preceding vowel to change or disapper. We are going to take a look at those cases below.
 * -ita/-itä when the plural marker -i- is preceded by a vowel (forming a long vowel or diphthong)

Declination types
Finnish nouns can be divided in different declination types based on the changes that happen in the stem of the word when a case ending is added. The section about foods have the kinds of nouns shown in the table below.

The table shows in the left column an example word of the type in question. The second column lists the words we learn in the section about foods and highlights the part or parts of the word which help you to recognize which declination type the word has. The third column shows some of the declinated forms which in this case are singular nominative, singular partitive and plural partitive. The dots separate the morphemes, that is the stem, the plural marker and the case ending.

There are, of course, more categories. And all of the categories have more words even though we have not learned theme yet.