Te teette tee

Any verbs in there? Pipes: from Favourites

I'm just back from an evening of verbs. Not any old verbs; Type I, II & III verbs (plus a couple of those lovely irregulars for fun). The teacher is saving Types IV & V for a treat later it seems. Along with those 13 suffix cases for nouns and pronouns probably. And consonant gradation. At least we did vowel harmony already. And this is the easy bit...

Other fun things:

• There is no word for 'please'
  
• 'No' acts like a verb... en, et, hän ei, se ei, emme, ette, he eivät, ne eivät
  
• You don't say half past the hour but half to the hour, thus pauli kaksi (lit: half two) is actually 1:30 - a recipe to be an hour late/early to that important meeting!
  
• In Finnish you can make a 25-letter palindromic word: SOLUTOMAATTIMITTAAMOTULOS (which means the result from a measurement laboratory for tomatoes, although technically it is a compound of four words). There is also the equally long SAIPPUAKUPPINIPPUKAUPPIAS which means soap cup trader. The longest English single word palindrome is 11 letters, and that's a stretch.
  
• There are no separate words for 'he' and 'she', hän means both.

I could go on, but much more interesting is this article on Finnish poetry in context of history and language.

Oh the title? Te teette tee - You [plural or polite form] make tea.
A phrase like that almost makes it all worth it.