The Finnish Declensional e-Stems

Abstract

Although I believe that the Finnish so-called long vowels are phonemically geminate clusters, I think that the term 'short-vowel stem' is a convenient designation for declensional or 'conjugational stems ending in a single vowel. In the following, when I speak of me-stems, se-stems, te-stems, etc., these are to be understood only as varieties of e-stems. Every declined word in Finnish has a vowel stem to which all or most of the case endings are suffixed in the singular. Many words also have a consonant stem; many do not: neither type can properly be said to predominate. Those words that do have a consonant stem form the partitive singular on that instead of on the vowel stem, occasionally also an alternative essive singular form. The other words build the entire singular paradigm on the vowel stem, except, sometimes, for the nominative. Among dissyllabic stems this exception applies only to e-stems and pronouns. The plural declension need not be considered in this paper. If there is no consonant stem in the singular there is none in the plural. Every vowel in the language occurs as stem vowel in the dissyllabic shortvowel stems. Except among the e-stems, there is no consonant stem; and (neglecting the pronouns) the nominative singular is the same as the stem: paita 'shirt', genitive paidan,' partitive paitaa; hdntd 'tail', hdnndn, hantad; viikko 'week', viikon, viikkoa; tytt6 'girl', tyt6n, tytt6d; lintu 'bird', linnun, lintua; myrsky 'storm', myrskyn, myrskyd; nyrkki 'fist', nyrkin, nyrkkid. Some two-syllable given names in -e and a very few other dissyllabic e-stems follow this pattern exactly: kolme 'three', kolmen, kolmea. So Aune, Kalle, Roope, etc.; also itse 'self', nukke (frequently irregular in the plural) 'doll', kaase (obsolete or extremely rare variant of kaaso) 'bridesmaid'. And there are about a hundred of the dissyllabic e-stems that follow the same pattern except for a change of final vowel to -i in the nominative: sormi 'finger', sormen, sormea. The rest use a consonant stem for the partitive, like the polysyllabic e-stems, or else they show variation between the two types of declension. The polysyllabic e-stems form a very large and important part of the Finnish vocabulary. Most of them are derived from shorter words by means of formative suffixes. They all have a consonant stem, which may or may not be identical with the nominative. Examples are joutsen 'swan', joutsenen, joutsenta;2 hapan 'sour', happamen, hapanta; vdsymys 'fatigue', vdsymyksen, vdsymystd;