Finnish has six “locative” (location-based) cases, which are generally first explained to students with the following table:
Movement | Internal (Inside) | External (Outside/On) |
---|---|---|
Static | Inessive (-ssa/-ssä) | Adessive (-lla/-llä) |
Moving Towards | Illative (-Vn, -hVn, -seen) | Allative (-lle) |
Moving Away From | Elative (-sta/-stä) | Ablative (-lta/-ltä) |
Or, to use an example from the Finnish word kauppa (store):
Movement | Internal (Inside) | External (Outside/On) |
---|---|---|
Static | kaupassa (in the shop’s interior) | kaupalla (at the shop’s perimeter) |
Moving Towards | kauppaan (into the shop’s interior) | kaupalle (toward the shop’s perimeter) |
Moving Away From | kaupasta (out of the shop’s interior) | kaupalta (out from the shop’s perimeter) |
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:
Movement | Inside | Outside | Elsewhere |
---|---|---|---|
Static | Inessive | Adessive | ??? |
Moving Towards | Illative | Allative | ??? |
Moving Away From | Elative | Ablative | ??? |
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.
Movement | Inside | Outside | Elsewhere |
---|---|---|---|
Static | just inside |
just outside |
just elsewhere |
Moving Towards | outside -> inside or elsewhere -> inside |
inside -> outside or elsewhere -> outside |
inside -> elsewhere or outside -> elsewhere |
Moving Away From | inside -> outside or inside -> elsewhere |
outside -> inside or outside -> elsewhere |
elsewhere -> inside or elsewhere -> outside |
(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:
Movement | Inside | Outside | Elsewhere |
---|---|---|---|
Static | just inside |
just outside |
just elsewhere |
Moving Towards | outside -> inside elsewhere -> inside |
inside -> outside or elsewhere -> outside |
inside -> elsewhere or outside -> elsewhere |
Moving Away From | inside -> outside or inside -> elsewhere |
outside -> inside or outside -> elsewhere |
elsewhere -> inside or elsewhere -> outside |
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:
Movement | Inside | Outside | Elsewhere |
---|---|---|---|
Static | just inside |
just outside |
just elsewhere |
Moving Towards | outside -> inside elsewhere -> inside |
inside -> outside or elsewhere -> outside |
inside -> elsewhere or outside -> elsewhere |
Moving Away From | inside -> outside or inside -> elsewhere |
outside -> inside oroutside -> elsewhere |
elsewhere -> inside or elsewhere -> outside |
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.
Movement | Inside | Outside | Elsewhere |
---|---|---|---|
Static | just inside |
just outside |
just elsewhere |
Moving Towards | outside -> inside elsewhere -> inside |
inside -> outside or elsewhere -> outside |
inside -> elsewhere or outside -> elsewhere |
Moving Away From | inside -> outside inside -> elsewhere |
outside -> inside oroutside -> elsewhere |
elsewhere -> inside or elsewhere -> outside |
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.
Movement | Inside | Outside | Elsewhere |
---|---|---|---|
Static | just inside |
just outside |
just elsewhere |
Moving Towards | outside -> inside elsewhere -> inside |
inside -> outside orelsewhere -> outside |
inside -> elsewhere or outside -> elsewhere |
Moving Away From | inside -> outside inside -> elsewhere |
outside -> inside oroutside -> elsewhere |
elsewhere -> inside or elsewhere -> outside |
Simplifying this table back down, and removing that hypothetical “elsewhere” case that doesn’t actually exist in practice, we end up with:
Movement | Inside | Outside |
---|---|---|
Static | just inside |
just outside |
Moving Towards | outside -> inside |
elsewhere -> outside |
Moving Away From | inside -> outside |
outside -> elsewhere |
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:
Movement | Inside | Outside |
---|---|---|
Static | just inside |
just outside |
Moving Towards | not-inside -> inside |
elsewhere -> outside |
Moving Away From | inside -> not-inside |
outside -> elsewhere |
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.
Case | Finnish | English | Explanation |
---|---|---|---|
Inessive | Olen kaupassa. | I am in the store. | Static inside |
Illative | Menen kauppaan. | I am going into the store. | not-inside -> inside |
Elative | Tulen kaupasta. | I am coming from [inside] the store. | inside -> not-inside |
— | — | — | — |
Adessive | Olen kaupalla. | I am at the store’s area. | Static outside |
Allative | Menen kaupalle. | I am going to the store’s area. | elsewhere -> outside |
Ablative | Lähden kaupalta. | I am leaving from the store’s area. | outside -> elsewhere |
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.