Ydinvoiman vastainen....

[Rob A.]

I've been trying to translate this:

Ydinvoiman vastainen mielenosoitus keräsi satoja Helsingissä

Useita satoja ihmisiä kokoontui ydinvoiman vastaiseen kynttilämielenosoitukseen Helsingin keskustassa tiistai-iltana. Ympäristöjärjestöjen tapahtumassa muistettiin Japanin luonnonkatastrofin uhreja.

So far I can't seem to quite understand the word, vastainen

I think this simply means:

Ydinvoiman vastainen..."Anti-nuclear"...

So the headline is:

"Anti-Nuclear Demonstration Gathers Hundreds in Helsinki"

The first paragraph is interesting grammatically, and I assume is very typical of well written Finnish....???...plenty of use of plural partitives and genitives....

Useita satoja imhisiä kokoontui ydinvoiman vastaiseen kynttilämielenosoitukseen Helsingin keskustassa tiistaiiltana.

I think this is an existential sentence...I say cautiously... And I think I would translate it this way, literally:

"There were gathered Tuesday evening in Helsinki's centre many hundreds of people to an anti-nuclear candle demonstration."

...and in more typical English:

"Many hundreds of people gathered Tuesday evening for a candle-light demonstration in central Helsinki."

I wonder how the "grammar-nazis" would analyze this sentence..??.... However the part that I'm wondering most about is ...ydinvoiman vastaiseen kynttilämielenosoitukseen . It seems to be a bit too "overt" for an existential sentence ...Maybe there is another way to say this...???

This last sentence is fairly easy:

Ympäristöjärjestöjen tapahtumassa muistettiin Japanin luonnonkatastrofin uhreja.
...this sentence is a Finnish "passive" /impersonal....the verb, muistettiin = "... remembered..."

So:

"In the environmental movement's event were remembered the victims of Japan's natural disaster."

[Edit:...More typical English:

"Victims of Japan's natural disaster were remembered [ or, memorialized...or, honoured, etc.] ... at the enivronmental movement's event."]

[Jukka Aho]

So far I can't seem to quite understand the word, vastainen

I think this simply means:

Ydinvoiman vastainen..."Anti-nuclear"...

Correct... (jonkin) vastainen means “anti-(something)”. There’s also the expression of time, “Perjantain vastaisena yönä kadulta kuului ammuskelua”, which means the night separating Thursday and Friday. Or you could use any other weekday as well, of course.

The first paragraph is interesting grammatically, and I assume is very typical of well written Finnish....???...plenty of use of plural partitives and genitives....:D

Useita satoja imhisiä kokoontui ydinvoiman vastaiseen kynttilämielenosoitukseen Helsingin keskustassa tiistaiiltana.

There’s only a single genitive, actually. Those -een words are in the illative...

the part that I'm wondering most about is ...ydinvoiman vastaiseen kynttilämielenosoitukseen . It seems to be a bit too "overt" for an existential sentence ...Maybe there is another way to say this...??? :?

You could use “kynttilämielenosoitukseen, joka oli ydinvoiman vastainen” but “ydinvoiman vastaiseen kynttilämielenosoitukseen” (“to an anti-nuclear candle[-light] demonstration”) is more compact.

[Bavarian]

Wiktionary says vastainen comes from the combining form vasta- (which is from vastaan) plus the -inen suffix. I think the term for the -inen adjectives would be an attributive adjective. At least, that's how I think of them. I'm sure the native Finns here will tell me I'm doing it all wrong.

I hope you weren't thinking that vastainen comes from this vasta.

[David O.]

There are a bunch of other words like vastainen, adjectives requiring a preceding noun in the genitive: välinen, kaltainen, kokoinen, pituinen, mittainen, etc.

Example sentence I found: Kysymys 150-160 cm mittaisille naisille: Mitä ajattelisit pituuden suhteen, jos 187 cm pituinen mies tulisi iskemään sinua?

I think this nicely illustrates a fundamental difference between Finnish and English logic. English only allows regular adjectives to precede a noun; more complex modifiers, like prepositional phrases, have to follow the noun (the above sentence, for example, would have to begin "Question to women between 150-160 cm tall")... Finnish has a similar restriction, but the desire to put things before the noun rather than after is stronger than it is in English, and therefore Finnish provides us with ways to turn those complicated modifiers into adjectives that can comfortably come before the noun. This flexibility is easy to see in the way Finnish uses verbal participles: surmattuna löydetty mies = the man who was found killed. (You can of course make a Finnish phrase that corresponds to the structure of the English...mies, joka löydettiin surmattuna... but the reverse isn't true, as evidenced by the absurdity of *The found killed man).

Sometimes, Finnish will even add in a seemingly extraneous verbal participle (which of course behaves like a normal adjective) in order to achieve the desired noun phrase structure. The word olevat in the sentence Pietari ja hänen kanssaan olevat opetuslapset olivat vaipuneet syvään uneen serves no semantic purpose... it's purely syntactic, allowing for the modifying postpositional phrase hänen kanssaan to come before the noun opetuslapset. (In English, of course, we'd just comfortably stick the prepositional phrase after the noun: "Peter and the disciples with him").

[Rob A.]

There are a bunch of other words like vastainen, adjectives requiring a preceding noun in the genitive: välinen, kaltainen, kokoinen, pituinen, mittainen, etc.

Example sentence I found: Kysymys 150-160 cm mittaisille naisille: Mitä ajattelisit pituuden suhteen, jos 187 cm pituinen mies tulisi iskemään sinua?

I think this nicely illustrates a fundamental difference between Finnish and English logic. English only allows regular adjectives to precede a noun; more complex modifiers, like prepositional phrases, have to follow the noun (the above sentence, for example, would have to begin "Question to women between 150-160 cm tall")... Finnish has a similar restriction, but the desire to put things before the noun rather than after is stronger than it is in English, and therefore Finnish provides us with ways to turn those complicated modifiers into adjectives that can comfortably come before the noun. This flexibility is easy to see in the way Finnish uses verbal participles: surmattuna löydetty mies = the man who was found killed. (You can of course make a Finnish phrase that corresponds to the structure of the English...mies, joka löydettiin surmattuna... but the reverse isn't true, as evidenced by the absurdity of *The found killed man).

Sometimes, Finnish will even add in a seemingly extraneous verbal participle (which of course behaves like a normal adjective) in order to achieve the desired noun phrase structure. The word olevat in the sentence Pietari ja hänen kanssaan olevat opetuslapset olivat vaipuneet syvään uneen serves no semantic purpose... it's purely syntactic, allowing for the modifying postpositional phrase hänen kanssaan to come before the noun opetuslapset. (In English, of course, we'd just comfortably stick the prepositional phrase after the noun: "Peter and the disciples with him").

Good points ...Thanks.... I hadn't quite thought of it that way for English, but that is so.... You can do this to a certain extent in English, but it can get clumsy very quickly...