Category:Finnish

    

From Namespedia - Names Meaning and Origins

Finnish is the language spoken by the population in Finland.It is one of the official languages of Finland(together with Swedish) and one of the official languages of the European Union. Finnish is a member of the Baltic-Finnic part of the Finno-Ugric group of languages which is part of the Uralic family of languages. There is more than a theory about the geographic origin of Finnish and the other Uralic languages, but the most widely held view is that the Proto-Uralic languages originated somewhere in the boreal forest belt around the Ural Mountains region.

The dialects of Finnish are divided into two distinct groups, the Western dialects and the Eastern dialects. The dialects are entirely mutually intelligible. Some common features are: 1) the absence of gender (pronoun hän =he and at also hän =she), 2) absence of articles 3) long words (same structure of the language) 4) many grammatical cases ( 15 in most cases) 5) personal possession expressed with suffixes 6) postpositions in addition to prepositions 7) no verb equivalent to the English verb “to have”. As time passed, there were contacts between the speakers of the Finno-Ugrian language and speakers of Indo-European languages (Baltic, Germanic and Slavic dialects).These contacts are proved by numerous loan words borrowed by Finnish, Estonian and the other Baltic- Finnic languages (Karelian, Lude, Vepsian, Vote and Livonian). About 23 million people speak a language of the Finno-Ugrian language family.Many of the languages are tiny: apart from Finnish (the largest in its group), Estonian and Hungarian, they are all threatened minority languages whose territories lie within the Russian Federation.

If we’re talking about names, if the parent's name has a double k, t or p, then the new name drops one of the double letters and adds an 'n' to the end (indicating possession, as `s in English)

    Mikko's = Mikon >> Mikko's son = Mikonpoika

    Vilppu's = Vilpun

For names with any other double consonants just add an 'n' to the end.

    Kalle's = Kallen >> Kalle's son = Kallenpoika

    Hannu's = Hannun

For names ending in "as" we have two possibilities. Replace the trailing "as" with "aan" or replace the trailing "as" with "aksen"

    Elias' = Eliaan or Eliaksen >> Elias's son = Eliaanpoika or Eliaksenpoika

    Tuomas' = Tuomaan or Tuomaksen

For names with no double consonants, just add an 'n' to the end.

    Juha's = Juhan >> Juha's son = Juhanpoika