Wednesday, August 30, 2006

Is Finnish a Difficult Language? [continued - 2]

After a relatively long summer break, I am resume posting here. I will try to come up with a new article at least every two weeks.

Continuing the subject, let's take up the nouns and the verbs.

Nouns, Verbs and "Grade Changes"

When learning the language, nouns are always presented devided in groups, each group following certain rules for inflection. The groups can be very general, in this case they'd be a bit over 10, and if one manages to learn this, he or she'd probably get right the inflections in 90% of the cases.

The same with verbs: there are 6 groups, once you learn them, you can inflect correctly 99% of the verbs.

Both the nouns (and all nominals in general) and the verbs undergo the so called "grade change", or "kpt change". The change can go both ways, depending on the group the noun or the verb is in.