Inside, outside, and elsewhere in Finnish locative case pedagogy

Finnish has six “locative” (location-based) cases, which are generally first explained to students with the following table:

Or, to use an example from the Finnish word kauppa (store):

I’ve always found this a little weird. I think I’ve finally pegged why.

The ablative kaupalta implies there’s an outside to the outside one can move to, say, the street outside of the shop’s parking lot (which would be where you might be standing if you said seison kaupalla). That implies that Finnish doesn’t really work on a mere “inside/outside” distinction. There’s an inside, an outside, and an elsewhere, which doesn’t really explicitly exist within the locative cases:

So ablative moves you outside -> elsewhere. Fair enough. What would we get if we tried to describe all of the cases with that kind of notation?

For someone with no knowledge of how Finnish is used in practice, it gets pretty weird pretty fast.

(Notice that the moving-towards cases all have the same end destination, but the moving-away-from cases all have the same start destination. That’s interesting!)

So… I submit, that the way Finnish evolved to pare down which cases actually get used for which situations, is partly driven by the face that there’s no elsewhere case (maybe there was a long time ago, I don’t know), and partly driven simply by what kinds of movement actually commonly happen in everyday life. That’s going to be our Rosetta Stone here.

Let’s turn our attention to moving-towards-inside, aka the illative case. Does it really happen that often that we move elsewhere -> inside in a single bound, e.g. from Norway all the way to the inner walls of this specific coffee shop? Not really. But describing moving from the parking lot of the shop to the inside of the shop happens a hell of a lot more often. So that second meaning just got dropped:

Now that we have an ‘unambiguous’ outside -> inside case, we can also take that out of the moving-away-from-outside ablative case. This fits with everything I’ve seen about how the ablative case, which spawned this whole elsewhere fruckus in the first place, is used in practice:

Now let’s look at the moving-away-from-inside elative case. Similar to before, how often does anyone really want to describe moving from e.g. sitting at their kitchen table to being on Mars? Not often. So inside -> elsewhere is right out.

And if the elative is now most commonly used to describe e.g. moving from inside of a store to the outside of the store, well, we can factor out inside -> outside from the moving-towards-outside case as well.

Simplifying this table back down, and removing that hypothetical “elsewhere” case that doesn’t actually exist in practice, we end up with:

Does that work? No, but it gets us a lot closer to the real meaning of these things. Having checked this over with my native Finnish speaker wife, it seems like I was too hasty to write off the inside cases when it comes to the elsewhere, but I was in the right with the outside cases. In reality, people totally say things like “Menään kaupaan” to mean “Let’s go to the store”, and “Menään kaupasta” to mean “Let’s get out of the store”.

So now we end up with this … kind of halfway point for the locative cases:

What I really want to draw your attention to here is that the elative case has absorbed what could technically be the other use case of the allative case. Frankly, it would just be a hell of a lot more confusing if we could use “Menään kaupalle” to mean either “Let’s go from the inside of the store to the outside of the store” or “Let’s go from our house to the outside of the store” - those are two almost diametrically opposed use cases. If you have to overload one definition or the other with inside -> outside, the elative is the much more natural feeling case to do that with.

This has all been very abstract and persnickety. Let’s close with a table of actual examples.

This is probably something professional linguists have much more precise words to describe than I do, but I feel satisfied with this halfway-logical breakdown of what the “maximal” locative case system might have looked like, including an explicit elsewhere, and how we got to where we actually are in practice. I’m not sure whether this train of thought will help anyone else when it comes to wrestling with this particular quirk of the famously difficult Finnish case system, but at the very least I hope it tells you you aren’t alone in wondering what the heck is going on with the whole “inside/outside” thing.

All models are wrong, some are useful; this particular model was more confusing than useful for me until I worked this out on paper.

Putting it to the test

As it so happens, I’ve been studying Finnish for about 4 years now, and have an understanding by this point in my life that no high-falutin’ conceptualization of something as messy as grammar can ever really work out well. So I decided to put this to the test.

I took some sentences from my daily Anki review sesh, recorded which case my intuition about Finnish grammar alone would suggest, then which case my intuition + following this table would suggest, then finally what case was actually used in the sentence. (Note: I might get the actual root word wrong, as I did with tästä/tosta, but that shouldn’t have much bearing on this.)

If you’re thinking by now “these descriptions and thought processes all feel kinda fake”, welcome to my world. Not only do I think the logic behind these desscriptions is kind of tenuous, but I also think it exists in measurable patterns. In other words, when you learn another language, part of what you’re learning is the wonky and often inconsistent ways the language’s speakers like to think of space and time relationships.

In any case, we are 3 for 3 so far for “intuition + table”, and only 2/3 for my raw, non-native intuition unaided. That lightly suggests there’s a there there.