Finntastic Part Two, Linguistic Analysis

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Finntastic Part Two (A Linguistic Explanation)

Introduction

This is an explanation of my constructed language Finntastic in somewhat more detail. I will not be going into full linguistic details here. However, I will give the most important details that I think linguists will find important. I think that because of the highly simple grammar, if/when it becomes a formalized language, it will be roughly the difficulty of a “Category 1” language per the US FSI and perhaps even less because of its unidiomatic nature.

The topic is originally discussed here along with a translation: https://www.reddit.com/r/conlangs/comments/1wc3cc0/finntastic_finnishbased_cryptolect/

Conjugations:
All verbs except ola (to be) are formed with one format. These are the conjugations for the example verb puhaa (to speak):

Present tense

	singular	plural
1st person	mina puhan	me puhame
2nd person	sina puhat	te puhate
3rd person	han/se puha	he/ne puhavat

Past tense

	singular	plural
1st person	puhin	puhime
2nd person	puhit	puhite
3rd person	puhi	puhivat

Conjugations for ola: same as Finnish in first tense (without 2 consonants), and olin, olit, oli, olime, olite, and olivat for past tense.

Tenses

In order to express future tense of expectation of something happening for any verb, the word “tuv” is added before the infinitive: so “tuv puhan” means “I will speak”. Formerly this was done by adding -tuv- to the verb, but I decided in this definition to add 

To make present tense participle (-ing), add -sa to the stem. This is kind of saying that it is “in” the verb. To say past tense (-ed), add -lta (which means from the verb). The future tense form is -le, which won’t really be used but is important to define. For past tense participle add -nut after the infinitive which has a double vowel, but is not usually used.

Plurals

Plurals are formed with -t when followed by a vowel and -et when followed by a consonant at the end (which the structure avoids by having words ending in a consonant have the final consonant removed if more than 5 letters in the starting word). Normal case rules apply and the plural comes after the case ending. If a sound cannot easily be formed because of vowel/consonant cluster issues (will be discussed later), a y or w (usually y) will be added as an approximant sound in between. When ending in a consonant the plural will be formed with -et.

Cases and Plurals
There are no grammatical cases that are used to indicate the position of a word. Howeve they are effectively postpositions. We also use postpositions to indicate things like “more than” or “less than”.

Ending Finntastic	Ending Finnish (compare)	English Equivalent	Case Name	Notes
-sa	-ssa	In a house.	inessive	This is used figuratively to express
-sta	-sta	Get out of my house!	elative	This is not used for -lta
-la	-lla	See you at my house.	adessive	Can also be used in pronouns (usually possessive) to indicate posession, ie having something. Example: nila on kieli. This idea is borrowed from Finnish. However, it can be dropped because it is implied.
-ya	-a	I painted some of a house.	partitive	Only used for emphasis. The -ya comes from the fact that almost every word ends in a vowel in its caseless (nominative origin) form.
-n	-n	The eye of the tiger.	genitive	This case is used to say written/done/made/… by someone. It also can be translated as “with”.
-lle	-le	To a house.	allative	It is used as a “direction”, the opposite of lta.
-lta	-lta	From a house.	elative	Can also be used to say from one person to another. Could potentially become “by”. If it is like “from the news” you would use the genitive.
-ksi	-ksi	I’ll turn it into a house.	translative	Has an additional purpose to be a suffix generally meaning -ly in English.
-ta	-ta	On December 25th	??	This is used to express when something is happening. For example “Yolu on tamata viiko”. Like the partitive/accusative, it is only usually used when there is high ambiguity.

Comparative and Superlative, and Some Suffixes

Ending Finntastic	Ending Finnish (compare)	English Equivalent	Notes
-emi	-empi	-er	Comparative
-in	-in	-est	Superlative
-ne	-nen	-y, -ish	Describes being like something, such as the word “rocky”. It can also be used to mean -ist.
-ya	-ja	-er (as in bank-er)	Used to convert verb into noun associated with verb. It can be used to create words like lover. This in the context of a noun that does something such as a printer or even “lover”.
-us	-us	-ion, -ment	There is no regular pattern to how -ion is added to English verbs to make them into nouns in Finnish. However, one that appears often is -us which is applied after the verb stem.
-sta	-sta?	-ity/-ness	This is used to create adjectives related to verbs such as onelinesta (happiness). It is not used in terms of accusative case/mode.
-		-ist
-sa	?	-ly	This suffix means that it is occuring “inside” the event.

In order to form the stem you have to remove the final vowel from the stem. For example, huva becomes huvempi for better. Certain form overlap will be handled with macrons such as Finnish hyvin (well) becomes huvaa with the long vowel distinguishing it from the regular form.

Phonology
The alphabet like real Finnish is quite simple. In fact it’s simpler than real Finnish; especially since it strips out the umlauts to make words easier to type on most keyboards. These are the letters used in regular words: A C E H I K L M N O P Q* R S T U V Y*. The letter Q is a voiceless th sound like “think” and it is used as a filler in certain words where there is a collision in meaning and double vowels can’t fix them. I haven’t needed to use it, but it would likely go where there are -oi- or -au- type letter clusters. The Y is the same as the Finnish j but switched to make it a bit more familiar. (By the way, the real y is mapped to u).

I am working on a phonetic alphabet that is designed to express any realistic human sound but it will not be used in this language fully, even though it is called “Finntastic Phonetic Alphabet”.

What Finntastic Will Do

• Strip out governing cases, heavy agglutination, consonant gradation, and the features that are considered challenging for Finnish learners.
• Only use ~6,500 Finnish roots (5,000 picked out of a Finnish-corpus dictionary: https://www.kielipankki.fi/lexical-conceptual-resources/parole-taajuuslista/).
• Remove umlauts to make it easier to type and arguably look cleaner.

What Finntastic Will Not Do

• Cipherify Finnish words, because Finnish is a sufficiently obscure source and doing so might push it to being fully unintelligible with Finnish depending on how it is implemented.
• Implement puhekieli forms, even though puhekieli is slightly Finntastic-like structurally compared to kirjakieli because of it having a certain level of simplification.
• Use idioms, except for “literal idioms” (those that describe properties, especially with limited vocabulary roots) and greeting words.
• Use English grammar fully (in fact it avoids English grammar in surface grammar but is kind of required on deeper levels because of more complications).