A substantive in apposition to another is usually in the same case.
It is to be noted that in such expressions as the town of Petersburg, the Emperor Alexander, the Finnish idiom conforms to the English in this respect, that if the object is inanimate, the proper name is put in the genitive. Helsingin kaupunki, the town of Helsingfors. Suomenmaa, Finland. In the case of a river either the nominative or genitive can be used. Nevan joki or Neva joki, the river Neva.
But if the proper name denotes an animate object, or a ship, it is put in the nominative, and remains in that case, even though the word in apposition to it is inflected. Keisari Suuriruhtinas Georg Aleksandrovitschin kanssa, the Emperor with the Grand Duke George Alexandrovitch. Professori Alquistin kuolema on suuri vahinko Suomelle, the death of Professor Alquist is a great blow to Finland.
When a word in apposition denotes the state of the subject at a given time, and not a general characteristic, it is put in the essive case. Poikana hän oli sairas, as a boy he was ill.
The Article.
There is no article in Finnish. Sometimes yksi (one) is used to represent the indefinite article, and in poetry the definite article is frequently expressed by a pronoun, such as tuo or se.
The rules given above will have made it clear, however, that under some circumstances Finnish can mark by the use of the cases the same distinction which we mark by the article. It may be said roughly that the nominative generally represents a substantive with the definite article in English (this would be still more true of French), and the partitive a substantive without an article. Thus, linnut ovat puussa means the birds are in the tree; but lintuja on puussa, there are birds in the tree. Ammuin lintuja is I shot some birds; ammuin linnut, I shot the birds. So, too, kivet ovat kovat means the stones are hard; while kivet ovat kovia means rather stones are hard. It would, however, be misleading to state such rules too dogmatically, as doubtless many instances could be found where the use of the nominative and partitive would not correspond to that of the article in English. Naturally, a language which has no articles and no gender is obliged to construct sentences differently from tongues which have these distinctions, and Finnish sentences, particularly in the older and simpler literature, are generally more precise than ours.
THE USE OF THE CASES.
The majority of the cases of the Finnish noun have, at any rate in their origin, a local meaning. Of these local cases two obvious groups are found, one called the interior local cases (inessive, elative, and illative), the other the exterior cases (the adessive, ablative, and allative). Another group is formed by the essive, partitive, and translative, which, however, do not hang together so closely as the cases above cited, inasmuch as the primary local meaning has in all of them been obscured by metaphorical uses. In all these groups the first member (inessive, adessive, essive) denotes originally rest in a position; the second (elative, ablative, partitive) motion from; the third (illative, allative, translative) motion to. From the original local meaning, all the cases, except the allative, come to indicate time. It may be roughly said that the first member denotes present time, the second past time, and the third future time. They are also used in a metaphorical sense, in which case the first members of the groups denote the state in which anything is, the second the state from which anything passes, and the third the state into which anything passes. In the first and second groups there is a close correspondence in the metaphorical use of the various members of the group: that is to say, if one member can be used metaphorically to express existence in a state, the others can be used to express a transition from or to it. Most of the cases have, however, in addition to these common uses, others which are peculiar to themselves and are not shared by the other members of the group.