Translative....

[Jukka Aho]

So what's the difference between that and the use of mukaan in this article:

Vantaan käräjäoikeuden mukaan vaimo surmasi miehensä ampumalla viime kesäkuussa Petikossa.

Or does the possessive not get used with inanimate objects? I could swear, though, that I've seen that mukaan used without a possessive suffix when it's according to some person (a police spokesman or some such).

You’re correct, but I believe the “rule” here is simpler: you attach possessive suffixes to mukaan when you’re using it with personal pronouns. (Spoken vernacular may drop the suffixes even with those.)

[Jukka Aho]

And..with infinitives ...at least the third infinitive, I think you could say:

Näin pääministerin nukkumassa.....Yes...???

....but now replacing the noun with a personal pronoun it would be:

Näin hänet nukkumassa....???

Yes, that’s how it goes.

[Rob A.]

And..with infinitives ...at least the third infinitive, I think you could say:

Näin pääministerin nukkumassa.....Yes...???

....but now replacing the noun with a personal pronoun it would be:

Näin hänet nukkumassa....???

Yes, that’s how it goes.

Of these two constructions:

Näin pääministerin nukkumassa.
Näin pääministerin nukkuvan.

...which would be the "favoured", or more common, one??

Also...for those who are interested, we've had this discussion before:

viewtopic.php?f=9&t=51401

....and the following paper, using rather complex academic language, seems to be the one that covers this type of "genitive" use:

http://www.stanford.edu/~kiparsky/Papers/finn.pdf

Essentially, once part of the clause is, presumably for reasons of grammatical convention, in the genitive case, the rest of the clause...subject and adjectives, etc., have to "follow suit" for grammatical consistency...that is, the various parts, if at all possible, have to "agree"...

[Edit: And I suppose it's this same old "trap" I seem to keep falling into...Trying to analyze Finnish grammar through the template of English grammar.... Certainly there is much in common, but there are also big differences as well..... I should have to write out on the blackboard one hundred times:

"First there is the language; second comes the grammatical analysis.".... In otherwords ,if the language works, but doesn't fit the rules of grammatical analysis developed originally for other languages, then these "rules" have to be modified...]

[AldenG]

Näin pääministeri Honkasen nukkumassa.

In this one you saw the minister himself in a state of sleeping. I threw in the name to make the side point that if it's a title preceding a name, the name inflects and the title doesn't.

Näin pääministeri Honkasen nukkuvan.

In this one you saw that the prime minister was sleeping.

It's a subtle but distinct difference in meaning. It wouldn't always matter but sometimes it would. For instance, you could in some circumstances see (or reliably infer) that the prime minister was asleep without seeing the prime minister.

[AldenG]

The distinction is more important and more clear in examples like these:

Heikki kertoi saapuvansa huomenna. Kuulin Heikin saapuvan huomenna.

Heikki said (told) he is arriving tomorrow. I heard Heikki is arriving tomorrow.
More literally: Hekki told (about) his arriving tomorrow. I heard (about) Heikki's arriving tomorrow.

Heikki kertoi saapuneensa eilen. Kuulin Heikin saapuneen eilen.

Heikki said he arrived yesterday. I heard Heikki arrived yesterday.
More literally: Heikki related his having arrived yesterday. I heard (of) Heikki's having arrived yesterday.

So when you say Näin pääministerin nukkuvan, that is the class of statement you're making. Again the English messes up the congruency a bit. Nukkuvan can be present or future, as the distinction isn't as clear in Finnish.

Kuulin Heikin saapuvan helikopterissa.

I hear this ambiguously either to mean that you heard Heikki arriving in a helicopter or that you heard he will arrive in a helicopter when he arrives.

There is similar ambiguity in Kuulin Heikin saapuvan (did I hear the sounds of his arrival or did I hear that he is-or-will-be arriving), but not in Luulen Heikin saapuvan. (I believe Heikki is arriving, which could be for instance huomenna or paraikaa, the latter being equivalent to "as we speak.")

[Rob A.]

OK...and pretty much the same as in English...subtle distinctions which may be important in some contexts....

I think I've concluded, correctly I hope, that the nukkuvan construction is an example of the mind-numbing genitive complement... I think it all ties back to that old dative-genitive case paradigm that appears in other languages as well...

And the nukkumassa construction is an example of the more easily grasped "third infinitive".....

Taking this a little further, here's how I think it would look with an additional adjective, but in the plural:

Näin laiskoja pääministereita nukkumassa.
Näin laiskojen pääministereiden nukkuvan.


And, now, in the negative singular:

En nähnyt laiskaa pääministeria nukkumassa.
En nähnyt laiskan pääministerin nukkuvan.....another "proof" that this can only be interpreted as a genitive complement.... Or, so I think...????

[Edit: I was responding to your post just before the one immediately above....but additional useful information in your second post...]

[AldenG]

I can't help you with the terminology. But I was coming back to sketch out another approach to the nukkumassa/nukkuvan contrast.

Näin pääministerin nukkumassa can be thought of as shorthand for Näin pääministerin kun hän oli nukkumassa.

Näen pääministerin nukkuvan is shorthand for Näen, että pääministeri nukkuu. I switched näin to näen so I wouldn't need to change nukkuu to nukkui when I spelled out the long form. Of course Näin pääministerin nukkuvan is fine and means you saw that he was sleeping in what was then the present moment (hence the present form).

There is flexibility in what I said about ___n nukkuvan implying you saw that someone was sleeping rather than necessarily seeing the actual sleeping person. That strikes me as the core meaning of the construct (as shorthand for että) but I also think the distinction is ignored a great deal in everyday usage. In situations where it is reasonable to construe -van like -massa, I think people will say -van without actually having an implied että in the back of their minds.

So someone could say Näin Leenan nukkuvan and be describing the visual experience of seeing her asleep. Of course there are other situations in which such an interpretation wouldn't be possible and a conceptual että is clearly implied.

Naturally it would be interesting to hear if I'm correctly describing how some natives think, though it's often hard to put one's finger on the subconscious processes that form a sentence.

[Jukka Aho]

Kuulin Heikin saapuvan helikopterissa.

Helikopterilla. (Autolla, laivalla, junalla, metrolla, raitiovaunulla, veneellä, lentokoneella, suihkuhävittäjällä, potkukelkalla, apostolinkyydillä, kantoraketilla...)

[Jukka Aho]

Naturally it would be interesting to hear if I'm correctly describing how some natives think, though it's often hard to put one's finger on the subconscious processes that form a sentence.

You have described it pretty much as I would have; probably even better. And I would agree with you in that the -van style expression is often preferred over the -ssa style expression when the subtle differences in the “canonical” or “expanded” interpretation of the meaning don’t really matter.

[silk]

apostolinkyydillä

This led me to think of something else... what is the Finnish expression for Equal-to-Apostles?

[Jukka Aho]

This led me to think of something else... what is the Finnish expression for Equal-to-Apostles?

“Pyhä apostolien vertainen”, apparently. See here as well.

[Upphew]

My googlefu failed me and I had to ask...

Kysymyksessä on apostolienvertaiset pyhät, heidän joukossaan tunnettuja ovat esimerkiksi 21.5. muistopäivää viettävät Konstantinos ja Helena.



Jyrki Härkönen

Ortodoksinen tiedotuskesku

[Rob A.]

This led me to think of something else... what is the Finnish expression for Equal-to-Apostles?

“Pyhä apostolien vertainen”, apparently. See here as well.

To be precise I think you can be "pyhä" without being "apostolien vertainen"...in other words these are two separate honorifics...

Now how about this historic personage:

Pyhä apostolien vertainen suuriruhtinas Vladimir Kiovalainen, Rusien ristiäjä...

...I've translated this from English, so it might not be exactly the way a native speaker would write it ...???

Interesting dynamic historic figure....venerated even in modern times by the Russian and Ukrainian Orthodox Churches...and others, I guess... And he was a Slavicized Varangian, in other words a ruotsilainen...He started life as a pagan, "muscled" his way to the top, even tried, at first, to elevate the pagan thunder-god... in Finnish, that well-known character, Perkele...

But, that didn't work so he settled on Christianity.... and even managed to marry a "born-in-the-purple" Byzantine princess... I would say he was a "man of action" in his time....Yes???



So I guess this is what you have to look like to be ...apostolien vertainen.......a cross in one hand; a sword in the other....

[onkko]

Dunno about holys but this is what happens holys in finland (why here isnt "smoke" hymiö)

[Rob A.]

Ehkä, tänä päivänä, piispa Henrik unohti miekansa....