Where is the line drawn between a declension and a phrase? Even though they're a single word, a lot of those Finnish variants appear to serve the purpose that a multi-word phrase would in most languages.
These noun declensions are not where it ends, though. There are many ways to derive adjectives from nouns and nouns from verbs and verbs from adjectives, so you can generate technically valid new words for quite a long time given just one root.
You have verbs like "dogged" and adverbs "doggedly" in English too.
In some language you can form several levels of diminutives from any noun. Even stuff that makes no sense, like "cute taxes", "cute death", "cute abstraction", "cute declension".
And you can form the opposite - take a noun and create less cute/uglier/larger version of it.
And these additional forms still obey the other rules, including declension. So there's a combinatorial explosion of versions of each word.
A cute abstraction would definitely be my thing. As we would say in Italian, an astrazioncella, or astrazionuccia, or astrazioncelluccia, or astrazioncinuccia, or astrazioncinelluccia. :)
They don't. Your teacher was a pervert. :)
Woda, wódka, wódeczka, wódzia, wódziunia.
and then if you don't like drinking you can go the other way:
wódka, wóda, wódzicha.
Generating verbs ("dogged", one syllable) from nouns ("dog") is absolutely universal among ALL languages, inflected or no, but is a much less regular process than the adjective-to-adverb derivation, as the relationship between an arbitrary noun and an arbitrary related verb is much less regular than that between an adverb and its matching adjective. English is pretty free in deriving verbs. Latin very obviously has methods of deriving verbs and adjectives from other parts of speech, but those are generally not given any formal grammatical treatment when you study the language -- it's expected that you'll just pick them up by feel.
Or, as Calvin said: “Verbing weirds language”
Any chance you know the term in linguistics for verbing things? I want to look it up because you're right that this feels like a natural thing to do, it's surprising that Turkish doesn't allow it.
I did find a paper on Google Scholar purporting to list "derivations producing verbs from nouns" in Turkish, "An Outline of Turkish Morphology" by Oflazer, Göçmen, and Bozşahin.
"Finnish is a member of the Finnic language family and is typologically between fusional and agglutinative languages. It modifies and inflects nouns, adjectives, pronouns, numerals and verbs, depending on their roles in the sentence."
"Fusional languages or inflected languages are a type of synthetic language, distinguished from agglutinative languages by their tendency to use a single inflectional morpheme to denote multiple grammatical, syntactic, or semantic features."
"An agglutinative language is a type of synthetic language with morphology that primarily uses agglutination. Words may contain different morphemes to determine their meanings, but all of these morphemes (including stems and affixes) remain, in every aspect, unchanged after their unions."
"A synthetic language uses inflection or agglutination to express syntactic relationships within a sentence. Inflection is the addition of morphemes to a root word that assigns grammatical property to that word, while agglutination is the combination of two or more morphemes into one word."
In a hardcore synthetic language, the difference between a word and a phrase is just about meaningless. The "words" can get full on crazy-pants, too.
Examples of how the system works in Finnish and in other languages on the continuum: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agglutination
In english you have dog and dogs, but can add articles and say 'these dogs' 'those dogs' 'the dogs' and so on. In languages like finnish, the articles are included in the word, thus more variations when you take case and word genders into consideration.
Also, pronouns like "these" and "those" can't be included in the word in Finnish -- however, those that indicate ownership can (i.e. my dog/s, or the genetive case* ). There's no direct equivalent of "the dog" in Finnish either, the closest being "these/those dogs" where applicable.
* For language nerds: considering the subject (that emphasizes the many declensions in Finnish), it is somewhat ironic that both "my dog" and "my dogs" is the same single word in formal Finnish. Unlike many other cases, plain genetive doesn't allow distinction between singular and plural.
No direct word for "please" either, unless you want to count kiitos, which I understand as thank you.
FYI those aren't articles, but demonstrative adjectives, which are part of the language class of determiners, to which articles also belong.
Languages use different concepts to express the same ideas. The study of languages isn't built around the ideas but around the structure of the language itself.