Rob A. wrote:So I should assume saying something like:
Mitä tämä p*skaa on sinä tarjoilet meille?
... would definitely not be well received by the "little old ladies".......:D
Yeah, it sounds more like something
Tony Soprano would say. But I’d fix that sentence a bit:
Mitä tämä paska on, jota sinä tarjoilet meille?
or even better:
Mitä tämä paska on, jota sinä yrität tarjoilla meille?!
Why the addition of the relative pronoun,
jota, and the comma and the relative clause? That’s just how Finnish works. Finnish prefers the explicit inclusion of
joka and
mikä, the relative pronouns. English has an opposite tendency where “that” and “which” are often seen as unnecessary. English text also tends to drop commas where Finnish text would require them.
Why not the partitive,
paskaa, as in your original? It’s because the pronoun
tämä – which is in the nominative and refers directly to the word
paska – doesn’t “agree” with the word
paska if it is in the partitive. Both words need to share the same case. In the above sentence,
tämä paska is your only real choice.
Since the first part of this sentence is essentially a predicative clause, although in the form of a question (“
Mitä on tämä paska?” or “
Tämä paska on... mitä?”) I guess that can explain the interplay of the nominative and the partitive here. You have something on your plate – a clearly defined, known portion which could be weighed on a scale, for example – so you tend to refer to it as a complete, known whole; hence the nominative. And you’re asking what larger entity (or a blob of uncountable substance, or an abstract category) it is a part of. Hence the partitive for the pronoun
mikä, which is also the “interrogative word” of this question.
Jukka Aho wrote:The word
tää is just the colloquial version of the pronoun
tämä. So the phrase you suggest would actually go “
Tämä on ihan helvetin hyvän lopun!”, in standard literary Finnish... which does not make much sense.
Rob A. wrote:So, considering how Che actually met his end I could say:
Tässä leffassa on ihan erinomainen loppu... jos satutaan olla oikeasta puolueesta!... ....:D
Yes. That’s very good. The latter clause has a colloquialism (“
satutaan olla”, grammatically using the passive voice but in actuality, being the common colloquial alternative for “
satumme olemaan”). It is good, fluent casual spoken Finnish, nothing wrong with it. If you want to be very proper and “literary”, though, and not include yourself in your assessment (for instance, if you’re writing a review of that movie for a magazine), you’d probably say “
jos katsoja sattuu olemaan”.
• • •
More of Mr. Guevara, but in pop/youth culture context (the video includes the Finnish lyrics as text – just wait for the singing to start – and the singer pronounces the words quite clearly):
(English translation by “qlight”, lifted from among the comments this video has received on YouTube:)
The floor of the hall was sticky and full of
dancing and strange borders
You had stolen a bottle of mint liqueur
and some one mark coins from your father's cabinet
And when we kissed
I believed in victory or death
Tell your man to wear a Che Guevara (shirt)
when you fall in bed
Would it bring back for a moment that feeling of danger
that you felt wring your stomach back then
when we painted our eyes black [1]
and rebelled at the smoking spot
and raged against the machine
Now they bring salt and bread to your two-bedroom apartment [2]
I am [sitting and] waiting in the corner for intoxication [to kick in] [3]
Your husband brings you a glass of wine and water
it's so lovely that it makes me sick
And when you kiss each other I want to be somewhere else, or someone else
Tell your man to wear a Che Guevara shirt
when you fall in bed
Would it bring back for a moment that feeling of danger
that you felt wring your stomach back then
when we painted our eyes black
and rebelled at the smoking spot
and raged against the machine
You can also find the Finnish lyrics as text
here. The alternative English translation offered on that site might be worth a look as well but has a couple of weird bits in it. (For the record, the word
kolmio can – and most often does – refer to the geometric shape, “triangle”, but in the context of a house-warming party it refers to the number of rooms in the apartment – the general “size class” of the apartment as used in rental and for sale ads.)
_____
[1] A reference to A Clockwork Orange. (The original music video refers to it as well.)
[2] Bringing salt and bread to a new apartment, as a gift to the host and the hostess, is an old house-warming custom observed in many countries and cultures.
[3] The protagonist of the song appears to be a guest to a house-warming party hosted by his former girlfriend and her current boyfriend/husband. He’s politely sitting in some corner of their new apartment, among the other guests, and quietly sipping the offered refreshments, observing the situation... but has these passive-aggressive, sarcastic thoughts and flashbacks of old memories running through his mind, unbeknownst to anyone. It is a quite bitter and jealous song, actually... :D But modern love songs often have a bittersweet twist. In the segment where the protagonist reminisces about what it was like when he and the girl were still teenage “rebels” and dating, eons ago, the lyricist is referring to the discontinued old currency, Finnish mark, or markka, which was replaced with the euro in 2002.
....[...with hyvän and lopun in the accusative...] I hope that makes sense grammatically.... 
