In the house

This lesson introduces two grammatical concepts: locative cases and existential sentences. Existential sentences are used to express what there is in a place, and locative cases are used to express where something is, where something comes from or where something goes to. These two grammatical features often go together.

Locative cases
Finnish has six locative cases. There are some which express relationship with being in something, and some which express relationship with being on, or at, something. These two sets of locative cases are, naturally, called the internal locatives and external locatives.

Both sets have three locative cases which express being, moving to, and moving from. When talking about physical places and objects, the correlation between a case in Finnish and a preposition in English is great. When things are more abstract you will have to learn the correct case by heart (in the summer, kesällä). The locative cases are also used in other expressions. For example, where English uses the preposition about, Finnish often uses the elative.

This section of the course will use inessive, elative, adessive and ablative. We will leave illative and allative for later.

Searching, finding...
In this lesson, we use inessive and adessive to describe where things are. We will also use elative (out of, from within) and ablative (off of, from on top) but we will use them with the words etsiä and löytää (search and find). These worbs use the from-construction to tell where you are searching or where you find.

Finnish has a lot of similar verbs which happen to or happen from whereas in English they would happen in (such as forget, leave, lose, buy...).

The names
The names of the cases may seem like total gibberish, but they actually have sensible latin roots. Just in case it might help you, and without turning this in to a latin course, here are the names of the cases explained.

Existential sentences
Existential sentence is a sentence in Finnish and it is very closely equivalent to the English "there is/there are". The archetypal existantial sentence begins with a (known) location, is followed by the verb to be in third person singular (on/ei ole), which is followed by the thing that there is and which is introduced for the first time. All the sentences above are such that you use there is or there are in English. In Finnish the verb is always in plural. This is a typical characteristic of an existential sentence. Notice also how the thing that is somewhere is a new topic and at the end of the sentence. If the thing is previously known, you would use a normal declarative sentence as below.