Forms like silee, ainoo for sileä, ainoa are found in poetry. In prose this form of contraction is confined to verbs.
The contraction of two vowels into one long vowel or diphthong also occurs in adding the case suffixes:—
(1) The a or ä of the partitive sing. with the final vowel of roots ending in a or ä forms a long vowel, e.g. jalka-a, leipä-ä become jalka͡a, leipä͡ä.
(2) When the e of a termination becomes i after the final vowel of a root, this i forms a diphthong with that vowel, e.g. korvaen becomes korva͡in; and when the i of the plural meets with the final vowel of a root it forms a diphthong with it.
The point in all these cases is that, though no change takes place in writing, the two vowels form one syllable instead of two.
Vowels which meet from the disappearance of k are often contracted in pronunciation: te͡en, nä͡in from teken, näkin, are pronounced as one syllable.
NOUNS.
Finnish is called an agglutinative language; that is to say, the words, as they appear used in a sentence, are formed of roots, to which have been added certain terminations: thus taloiltansa, meaning from his farms, is made up from the root talo, and the suffixes i (a sign of the plural), -lta (giving the idea of from), and -nsa (his).