(2) A good many words expressing some state or feeling are used with the verb olla, and a genitive of the person who feels. Minun on jano, I am thirsty; minun on nälkä, I am hungry; minun on tarve, I must. Hänen on aika mennä, it is time for him to go. Similarly, Rikkaiden on velvolisuus antaa köyhille, it is the duty of the rich to give to the poor. Sotamiehen on pakko mennä vaaraan, it is the duty of a soldier to go into danger. In these latter sentences the genitive seems quite natural in our idiom, but they are really closely analogous to the phrases given above. In the dialect spoken about St. Petersburg it is usual to say minulla (not minun) on jano, nälkä.
Some of the examples quoted above support the idea (v. p. [24]), that there is an old dative in Finnish ending in n, which has become confused with the genitive. It is hardly possible to explain otherwise such expressions as Jumalan kiitos, thank God; Anna minun olla rauhassa, leave me in peace.
IV. The genitive is used with the infinitives and participles to denote the agent. Examples of this use will be found in the description of the use of those parts of the verb (p. [184, ff.]).
This use is also found after caritive adjectives. Miekan miehen käymätöntä (Kal. xxviii. 257), untouched by the sword of man.
The Internal Cases—Inessive, Elative, and Illative.
The inessive, elative, and illative are sometimes called the interior cases, because they express existence in and motion from or to the interior of an object. The adessive, ablative, and allative, on the other hand, are called the external cases, because they indicate rest on and motion from or into the exterior surface of an object. However, this distinction is not always kept up in the use of the cases, and the choice of the interior or exterior case in a given phrase seems often to be regulated by idiom or caprice, rather than by a reference to the original meaning.
Inessive.
I. The proper meaning of this case is existence in an object. Mies istuu tuvassa, the man sits in the hut. Parempi kala suussa kuin haava päässä, a fish in the mouth is better than a wound in the head. Vene kulkee vedessä, the boat moves in the water. Here the inessive is used, because, though motion is indicated, it is motion within a given space, and not to or from a given point.
There is much irregularity as to the use of the exterior and interior cases of local proper names, (1) Names ending in la always take the interior cases for euphony. Urjalassa, not Urjalalla. (2) Names of countries not ending in maa, and foreign names generally take the interior cases; but the word Venäjä, Russia, is always used in the forms Venäjällä, -ltä, -lle. (3) Names of countries ending in maa are generally used in the exterior cases, but the interior cases are used in speaking of things being found in the country. Olin Saksanmaalla, I was in Germany, but Saksamaassa on paljo sotamiehiä, there are many soldiers in Germany. But Suomenmaa, Finland, is always used in the interior cases.
Besides this strict use, the inessive is employed in a variety of expressions either metaphorically or in a loose local sense. Most of such phrases are quite obvious, and can be rendered in English by the preposition ‘in.’