Verbs

A verb is a word which denotes actions, events, or states of being. In more simple terms, it shows what someone is doing. Or what happens; if it's raining, there's not necessarily anyone who is doing the rain, but still to rain is a verb.

One important feature of the verb is, that it describes the relationship between subject and object. Subject is the one, who is doing something. Object is the other, it's the target of the action. Thus, verb expresses what the subject is doing to the object.

In Finnish, it matters a lot who is the subject. This is called personal conjugation:

As you can see, the verb has different endings, depending on the subject (The 3rd singular (he/she) is marked by long vowel.)

• 6 persons (I, you, he/she, we, you, they)
• 4 tempus (present, imperfect, perfect tense, past perfect)
• 4 moods (indicative, imperative, conditional, potential)

and also, it has

• active/passive voices
• 5 infinite voices
• 2 participle voices

To conjugate a verb, you need to know which type it is. There are 6 different types of verbs.

Verb is the "head" of the sentence. It determines the meaning of the sentence and what other parts it may, or has to, include.

All topics

• Vowel harmony
• Consonant gradation
• Verbs in general
• Personal forms
• Tempus
• Infinitives
• Verb types
• Negation
• Participles
• Nomines in general
• Nominative, genitive, partitive
• Essive, translative, abessive
• Location cases
• Pronouns
• Subjects and objects
• Types of senteces
• Questions
• Modifiers
• Derivation
• Orthography