The Handbook of the Finnish Language, with its careful phonological, word statistical, and phonetic foundation, is a fundamental work. Lauri Hakulinen offers a comprehensive historical and comparative phonology and morphology in Volume I, taking into account the general linguistic literature available up to the time of the handbook's first publication and fully citing the relevant Finnish scholarly literature. Of crucial importance is the clear yet detailed derivational theory, which corresponds to what was known as etymology in traditional grammar and is largely applicable to Finnish as an agglutinative language. Due to the resulting thorough insight into the semasiology of the Finnish language and the spirit of the Finno-Ugric languages, this work is essential not only for every Finnic scholar but also for general linguists.