Appendix:Finnish adpositions
This page documents Finnish prepositions and postpositions. The latter are much more common in Finnish.
In both cases, unlike in e.g. English, most Finnish prepositions and postpositions may be used adverbially on their own, e.g. alapuolelta can both mean "from below (something)" as well as "from below" (implied to be e.g. below the speaker, below the person being spoken about, or similar). Therefore, not all of these uses might be listed in entries.
Postpositions
[edit]Many of the postpositions in Finnish originate from inflections of words that are no longer themselves used.
If a postposition requires the genitive case, and a personal pronoun in genitive (minun, sinun, hänen, meidän, teidän, heidän) is used before the main word, the corresponding possessive suffix (-ni, -si, -nsa / -nsä, -mme, -nne) is appended to the postposition in standard Finnish. A first-person or second-person pronoun can then be omitted. Some examples:
- minun + jälkeen → (minun) jälkeeni
- sinun + kanssa → (sinun) kanssasi
- teidän + edellä → (teidän) edellänne
- heidän + ohitse → heidän ohitsensa or heidän ohitseen
Note however that the possessive suffixes are not that common in colloquial Finnish, in which case the genitive pronouns may not be omitted (in general, colloquial Finnish tends to drop pronouns considerably less often than standard Finnish).
The possessive suffix cannot be appended to the shortened postpositions ali, yli, ohi, taa, luo and läpi. Either the corresponding longer form alitse, ylitse, ohitse, taakse, luokse or lävitse is used instead, or the possessive suffix is left out.