There are many ways in Finnish to express a lack of something. In this article, we’ll look at adpositions expressing a lack (such as vailla and ilman), derivational elements (such as -ton and epä-) and the case ending -tta (abessive case).

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1. The preposition ilman “without”
2. The adpositions vailla and vaille
3. The conjunction paitsi “except”
4. The abessive case (abessiivi)
5. The derivational suffix -ton/-tön
6. The prefix epä-
7. Examples
   1. Rephrased statements
   2. Translated phrases

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1. The preposition ilman “without”

The word ilman is a preposition meaning “without”. Like most prepositions, the word it’s related to will be inflected in the partitive case.

We can also use “ilman että” with whole sentences.

2. The adpositions vailla and vaille

Vailla means “without”, just like ilman, but is more poetic. Vailla and vaille are in most cases interchangeable. They can both be used as postpositions (e.g. vastausta vailla) and prepositions (e.g. vailla vastausta).  You will use the partitive case no matter if you use it as a preposition or a postposition.

Vaille is used most commonly in combination with the verb jäädä to express a lack that remains; rather than being fulfilled.

You have most certainly come across vailla/vaille when studying how to tell the time in Finnish. This usage logically makes some sense: when you say it’s viisi minuuttia vaille kolme (five minutes to three), you’re saying that the hour is lacking five minutes at the moment. In this context, you can use both the basic form and the partitive, as you can see from the example below.

3. The conjunction paitsi “except”

The word paitsi expresses that there is an exception to a generalized statement. The most common alternative way to rephrase these sentences is by using the phrase “lukuun ottamatta” (with the exception of).

4. The Abessive Case (Abessiivi)

We can also use the abessive case ending -tta to express the lack of something. This is less common than using ilman. The abessive’s -tta can be added to both nouns and verbs. This is not a productive form: you will only find it added to certain nouns. You can’t just add it to any word and use it that way. Nobody will on the fly invent “tietokoneetta“, for example, to say “without a computer”. In this case, you will use ilman: ilman tietokonetta.

While the abessive is fairly rare with nouns, it’s commonly used with verbs. By inflecting the verb in the third infinitive‘s -matta form, you can express that something happened without doing a certain action. This is a productive form: you can create your own forms according to this pattern on the fly: Lähdin laulamatta ja ratkaisematta matemaattisia pulmia. means “I left without singing and without solving mathematical problems”. While my example sentences is unusual, this is totally possible.

It’s very common to use jäädä in combination with the -matta form of verbs. This expresses that something remained undone.

There are some common phrases using the abessive case that express a lack of something: lukuun ottamatta (except for), jostakin huolimatta (despite) and jostakin riippumatta (regardless of).

5. The derivational suffix -ton/tön

We can add the element -ton/-tön to the end of nouns to make them into adjectives that express a lack of something. These words inflect in the cases as explained here.

The element can also be added to verbs. To do this, you have to find the third infinitive form of the verb (the same form as lukemaan, lukemassa and lukematta), to which you add -ton. You might wonder what the difference is between lukematta (the abessive form of lukea) and lukematon. The former ending is used to create adverbs, while the latter creates adjectives.

These adjectives can also be turned into adverbs. However, these adverbs are not productive ie. you can’t create this form based on any adjective. In contrast, the -matta form (the abessive case) of verbs is productive: you can add the ending in theory to any verb you wish. Adverbs ending in -ttomasti are much more limited to certain phrases like in the table below.

6. The prefix epä-

The prefix epä- is mainly used to create adjectives. You can read more about the difference between epä- and -ton here.

Some adjectives starting with epä- can also be turned into adverbs by adding -sti. This is another unproductive form, ie. you can’t just add it to any adjective. Rather, there are certain words that allow for this, which you will have to learn one by one.

7. Examples

7.1. Rephrased statements

The following section is meant to give an idea of how the forms in this article can be used as synonyms. In many cases we can’t just swap these at will. There are many words and phrases that can only be expressed using one way. Still, I figured these example sentences might be interesting to compare!

7.2. Translated phrases

Links:

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• Words ending in -ton/-tön
• Finnish prefix epä- for negation ~ Non- un-
• The abessive case -tta/ttä – Abessiivi
• VISK: Substantiivin abessiivimuoto, ilman ja paitsi

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