Finnish

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Grammar stuff

Common formulas:

Negations

Finnish uses negation verb which needs to be translated from many languages from negation and verb together.

=== Possession structure

Finnish does not have idiomatic verb for possession, if apertium language to translate from has vbhaver it can be translated to omistaa initially and re-organised into adessive of owner and copula on.

Adposition to case suffix

Finnish uses semantic cases for what many e.g. IE languages use adpositions:

  • houses -> talot
  • on houses -> taloissa
  • into houses -> taloihin

etc.

  <section-def-macros>
    <def-macro n="adp-mangler" npar="1">
      <choose>
        <!-- adp to case mappigngs -->
        <!-- based on adp lexeme only -->
        <when>
          <test>
            <equal><clip pos="1" side="sl" part="lem"/><lit v="I"/></equal>
          </test>
          <let>
            <var n="adpcase"/>
            <lit-tag v="ine"/>
          </let>
          <let>
            <var n="maybeadp"/>
            <lit v=""/>
          </let>
        </when>
        <when>
          <test>
            <equal><clip pos="1" side="sl" part="lem"/><lit v="i"/></equal>
          </test>
          <let>
            <var n="adpcase"/>
            <lit-tag v="ine"/>
          </let>
          <let>
            <var n="maybeadp"/>
            <lit v=""/>
          </let>
        </when>
        <when>
          <test>
            <equal><clip pos="1" side="sl" part="lem"/><lit v="fra"/></equal>
          </test>
          <let>
            <var n="adpcase"/>
            <lit-tag v="ela"/>
          </let>
          <let>
            <var n="maybeadp"/>
            <lit v=""/>
          </let>
        </when>
...
...
...
    <rule comment="adp noun">
      <pattern>
        <pattern-item n="adp"/>
        <pattern-item n="noun"/>
      </pattern>
      <action>
        <call-macro n="adp-mangler">
          <with-param pos="1"/>
        </call-macro>
        <out>
          <chunk name="adpnoun" case="caseFirstWord">
            <tags>
              <tag><lit-tag v="NP"/></tag>
              <tag><var n="adpcase"/></tag>
            </tags>
            <lu>
              <clip pos="2" side="tl" part="lem"/>
              <clip pos="2" side="tl" part="a_noun"/>
              <clip pos="2" side="tl" part="a_number"/>
              <var n="adpcase"/>
            </lu>
            <b pos="0"/>
            <lu>
              <var n="maybeadp"/>
            </lu>
          </chunk>
        </out>
      </action>
    </rule>

The effective range of adposition to suffix mapping is a noun phrase:

  • (a) green colourless dream -> vihreä väritön uni
  • in (a) green colourless dream -> vihreässä värittömässä unessa

but proper noun phrase is appositive:

  • for Donald Trump -> Donald Trumpille
  • for president Trump -> presidentti Trumpille

in Nokia Finnish a reverse pattern is used (because computers cannot inflect variables a proxy word is inflected):

  • user -> käyttäjä
  • to user Joe -> käyttäjälle Joe
  • file -> tiedosto
  • into file thesis.doc -> tiedostoon thesis.doc

it would not be incorrect to use proper inflection in these cases.

See also

Languages in github

Language pairs in github