Use of hän and he is mostly restricted to writing and formal or markedly polite speech as this clear distinction has never occurred naturally[clarification needed] in the language.
The most common variants are mä and sä, though, in some dialects mää and sää, mnää and snää or mie and sie are used.
On the other hand, me, te and he lack reduced colloquial forms, so variants such as myö, työ, and hyö of some eastern varieties are dialectal.
English lacks a direct equivalent to the pronoun mones; it would be "that-th", or "which-th" for questions.
These include: Finnish does not have grammatical gender, not even in personal pronouns: hän is 'he', 'she' or 'they' (singular) depending on the referent.
Another class of consonant-stem words end in a consonant even in the nominative; if a stem vowel is required for phonotactic reasons, e again appears.
In Modern Finnish, only dental and alveolar consonants /l n r s t/) occur word-finally but previously words ending in /ʃ~ʂ h k m/ were possible as well.
Vocalization or lenition is found in addition to any possible consonant gradation, e.g. kuningas (nominative) ~ kuninkaan (genitive), or mies ~ miehen.
Adding -inen to a noun is a very productive mechanism for creating adjectives (lika 'dirt, filth' → likainen 'dirty'; ilo 'joy' → iloinen 'merry, happy'; muovi 'plastic' → muovinen 'made of plastic'/'plastic-like' ).
Thus, the stem for these words removes the -nen and adds -s(e) after which the inflectional ending is added: Here are some of the diminutive forms that are in use: A special class of Finnish nouns in -nen are surnames.
*perhek- *perheke- *perheh(e)- *liikkeke- *liikek- *liikkehe- *liikeh However, in some dialects, the much older *-ś> stems have shifted to -s instead, for instance in Pohjanmaa dialect *weneś > venes for standard vene ('boat') The partitive stem behaves yet differently due to a loss of word-medial -e- in some contexts before the change from *-k- to *-h- took place, in which the consonant has been assimilated to a -t- before it occurred in the context for being lost.
For example: Note that because the superlative marker vowel is i, the same kind of changes can occur with vowel stems as happen in verb imperfects, and noun inflecting plurals: Since the superlative adjective is still an adjective, it must be inflected to agree with the noun it modifies.
A handful of verbs, including nähdä "to see", tehdä "to do/make", and juosta "to run" have rare consonant mutation patterns which are not derivable from the infinitive.
In spoken Finnish, some frequently used verbs (mennä, tulla, olla, panna) have irregular stems (mee, tuu, oo, paa, instead of mene, tule, ole, pane ("go, come, be, put"), respectively).
The so-called Finnish passive is impersonal and unipersonal, that is, it only appears in one form regardless of who is implicitly understood to be the performer of the action.
In that respect, it could be described as a "fourth person" since there is no way of connecting the action performed with a particular agent (except for some nonstandard forms; see below).
This type of expression is considered prescriptively incorrect, but it may be found wherever direct translations from Swedish, English, etc.
In colloquial speech, the pronoun me cannot be omitted without confusion, unlike when using the standard forms menemme (indicative) and menkäämme (imperative).
This can result in a closed syllable becoming open and so trigger consonant gradation: Conditional forms exist for both active and passive voices, and for present tense and perfect.
Politeness is normally conveyed by tone of voice, facial expression, and use of conditional verbs and partitive nouns.
Menes implies expectation, that is, it has been settled already and requires no discussion; menepä has the -pa which indicates insistence, and -hän means approximated "indeed".
The potential has no specific counterpart in English, but can be translated by adding "possibly" (or occasionally "probably") to the verb.
This often creates difficulties for the non-Finn when trying to determine the infinitive (in order to access the translation in a dictionary) when encountering an inflected form.
These contracted verbs may also be subject to consonant weakening when forming the infinitive e.g. mainita 'to mention' has the longer conjugated stem mainits- as in mainitsen huomenna, että... 'I'll mention tomorrow that...' e.g. paeta 'to flee' has the longer conjugated stem paken- as in me pakenimme Afganistanista 'we fled from Afghanistan' The first infinitive long form is the translative plus a possessive suffix (rare in spoken language).
This corresponds to the English gerund ("verb + -ing" form), and behaves as a noun in Finnish in that it can be inflected, but only in a limited number of cases.
For example Though not an infinitive, a much more common -minen verbal stem ending is the noun construct which gives the name of the activity described by the verb.
The -iin ending of the past passive is replaced with -ava/ävä, which can be inflected in the same way as the present active participle.
If used with the appropriate third-person singular form of the verb olla and with the subject in the genitive it can express necessity or obligation.
In inexact spoken usage, this goes vice versa; the possessive suffix is optional, and used typically only for the second-person singular, e.g. sun käyttämäs.
Questions which in English would be answered with 'yes' or 'no' replies are usually responded to by repeating the verb in either the affirmative or negative.