It's still incredibly easy compared to the fusional case systems in languages like Latin or Russian.
Just to continue the explainer, vowel harmony means that “in the house” is “talossa” but “in the forest” is “metsässä”. Notice that it’s “-ssä” and not “-ssa”. This depends on which vowels are in the root. There’s two groups of vowels and Finnish words helpfully never mix the two in a single (non compound) word.
In other words, “vowel harmony” sounds fancy, but it’s a single
if root.match(/a|u|o/) then “ssa” else “ssä”Quite the opposite; /u/ is a high vowel, /o/ is mid-high, and /a/ is low. AOU vowels, assuming the Finnish orthography is anything like the rest of Europe, are made with your tongue pulled back, while ÄÖY are made with your tongue thrust forward.
It's not only not a 1:1 mapping, and not only can wildly different spellings sound the same, but wildly different pronunciations can be written the same. It's crazy.
That is not evidence that they are case affixes rather than separate words. The English articles adjust their pronunciation based on the word that follows them, but they are considered separate words rather than inflectional definiteness markers.
There is a special term for lexical items which are independent words in a syntactic sense without simultaneously being independent words in a phonological sense; they are called clitics, not affixes.
Except that this is a claim you just made up, which is not reflected in any usage of the term.
SIL ( https://glossary.sil.org/term/clitic-grammar ):
> A clitic is a morpheme that has syntactic characteristics of a word, but shows evidence of being phonologically bound to another word.
Wikipedia ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clitic ):
> a clitic [] is a morpheme that has syntactic characteristics of a word, but depends phonologically on another word or phrase.
The English 'genitive' particle 's is a clitic[1] because it takes its pronunciation from the syllable it follows. Not because it has grammatical functions at a phrase level. Clitic 'm can only ever follow the pronoun I, but that does nothing to stop it from being clitic.
[1] Actually, CGEL prefers to call 's a "phrasal case marker", but I find that absurd.
>Another illustration of fusionality is the Latin word bonus ("good"). The ending -us denotes masculine gender, nominative case, and singular number. Changing any one of these features requires replacing the suffix -us with a different one. In the form bonum, the ending -um denotes masculine accusative singular, neuter accusative singular, or neuter nominative singular.
That's very abstract but an example makes it clear. Consider some Latin words with their English translations:
mensa -- table (singular, nominative)
mensae -- tables (plural, nominative)
mensae -- to the table (singular, dative)
mensis -- to the tables (plural, dative)
There are two parts of meaning (whether it's singular vs. plural, and whether it's nominative vs. dative) which are expressed in these forms, but the way this is done is opaque. You can't look at "mensis" and break it into a part that corresponds to plurality, and a part that corresponds to dative: the suffix -is conveys both of those features simultaneously. That's a fusional language.
Compare with the Hungarian equivalents: (Finnish is similar, but I know Hungarian and not Finnish)
asztal -- table (singular, nominative)
asztalok -- tables (plural, nominative)
asztalnak -- to the table (singular, dative)
asztaloknak -- to the tables (plural, dative)
Here you can identify that the suffux -ok corresponds to plural and the suffix -nak corresponds to dative. So the Hungarian paradigm here is agglutinative, not fusional. The upshot is that the Hungarian paradigm will be easier to learn and to extend to a very large number of cases compared to the Latin paradigm.