2369: Abessive Case Jun 13, 2021

Finnish is known for its many grammatical cases: an amount that would put Latin to shame. Still, not all of these are as common as others, such as the abbessive case, a.k.a. caritive or privative case. This expresses a lack of something, and would be roughly comparable to the English '-less', for instance in:

raha (money)

rahatta (without money)

but this is increasingly being replaced with other words like 'ilman' meaning 'without' and is already fairly rare to find in normal speech, though still used to some extent in writing. Hungarian also has suffixes and postpositions for this purpose, but the postposition is not considered a suffix and won't have vowel harmony. Other languages, even related languages like Estonian and many Turkic languages use this case fairly productively, so it's not disappearing universally by any means.

2219: Finnish Borrowing from Itself—Jan 11, 2021

Finnish is known for taking on lots of loan words, but it has even loaned some of its own, sort of. On the water by Finland’s capital lies Iso Huopalahti (felt bay), which was earlier Haapalaksi, with ‘-laksi’ being an older form of ‘lahti’ and ‘haapa’ means ‘aspen’. Note that both ‘huopa’ (felt) and ‘haapa’ (aspen) both borrow from Germanic roots for those words. While changing a name from Huopalahti to Haapalaksi might not seem so crazy, the reason for this comes from the Swedish name ‘Hoplax’—the area is bilingual—which comes from ‘Haapalaksi’. This means that Huopalahti [Finnish] comes from Hoplax [Swedish, a Germanic language], from Haapalaksi [Finnish] ultimately from another Germanic word, though this last point is not strictly related. This does happen in other languages too, such as the French ‘biftèque’, a direct loan of the English ‘beefsteak’, with ‘beef’ once replacing the (Old) English ‘cū‘ (cow).