Translative....

[David O.]

Bin Ladenin tappamista pidetään viime vuosikymmenellä tuntemattomasta Illinois'n osavaltion senaattorista Yhdysvaltain ensimmäiseksi tummaihoiseksi presidentiksi kohonneen ja sen jälkeen suurelle osalle amerikkalaisia pettymystä tuottaneen Obaman virkakauden suurimpana ulkopoliitisena saavutuksena.

Heh... this is a good one...

To my ear suurelle osalle amerikkalaisista sounds better, but after repeating the sentence a few times I'm not sure any more. What do you think?

Yeah, this is interesting. I remember researching this very question a few months ago and concluding that the partitive and elative are both correct there, but that the elative is more common. Looking at it again, I can't explain why I chose the partitive; there wasn't any particular thought behind it. But as to whether it actually makes any difference or whether one form really is preferable there, I'll have to defer to the natives...

[AldenG]

I think that in a meaning like that, I tend always to use the elative for plural but I might dither between elative and partitive for singular, probably leaning toward partitive. It's hard to say with hypotheticals, though. And not that you should be guided by my opinion in this, especially as you seem to have researched it a bit.

[David O.]

Checking to see if I remembered right... Google says:
"osalle suomalaisia": 456 results
"osalle suomalaisista": 1010 results
"osalle maailmaa": 42 results
"osalle maailmasta": 7 results
So the wisdom of the crowds says to use the partitive for singular, and to more or less go with your gut for plural, leaning toward elative.

[Rob A.]

It seems, if at all possible, Finnish wants adjectives and adjectival phrases to precede the noun they are modifying... English is more flexible in this regard with adjectival phrases typically following the noun...

English is definitely not more "flexible".

Yes...I suppose I wasn't being clear here...I think I should have used the word: "variable".... Adjectives and adjectival phrases don't have quite the insistence that Finnish has that they should proceed the noun... Thus "flexible" should not be interpreted to mean: "optional"...

Try this sentence: Bin Ladenin tappamista pidetään viime vuosikymmenellä tuntemattomasta Illinois'n osavaltion senaattorista Yhdysvaltain ensimmäiseksi tummaihoiseksi presidentiksi kohonneen ja sen jälkeen suurelle osalle amerikkalaisia pettymystä tuottaneen Obaman virkakauden suurimpana ulkopoliitisena saavutuksena. That's an extreme example, and a painfully artificial one, but wade through it and you should be able to handle just about any noun phrase you ever come across...

Interesting sentence.... I, more or less, know what this means, though there are a few words I can't quite figure out...in particular, kohonneen.....

There is only one verb here, pidetään.... a passive verb, thus Bin Ladenin tappamista is an object of this verb...but I'm not actually sure of the meaning of the verb in this context.... I think it means: "one likes"...but that doesn't totally make sense ...??? I think the direct object of this sentence is ...Obaman virkauden suurimpana ulkopoliitisena saavutuksena...."being Obama's term of office's biggest foreign policy accomplishment."

I'll keep working on this sentence though...thanks for the practice....

[Aside: Although I'm not so sure about the sentiments this sentence expresses.... Though it supports that old American political adage, that the only stage possible for a US President to "shine" is the world stage...the office is given wide latitude in foreign affairs and is severely constrained in domestic affairs.... Apparently enough latitude to "invade" a foreign country...and erstwhile ally... without constraint.... ]

[onkko]

though there are a few words I can't quite figure out...in particular, kohonneen.....

from kohota, rise. "who has risen" is how i would translate that.

And here is image of koho

[AldenG]

The core of the sentence (and the answer to part of your question) could be characterized as

sitä pidetään sellaisena

...stating that a thing is considered to be (or "held to be") of a certain nature -- from sellainen, "that kind of."

Or if you want to translate essive -na with "as," then you have "it is regarded as [like that]"

[Rob A.]

The core of the sentence (and the answer to part of your question) could be characterized as

sitä pidetään sellaisena

...stating that a thing is considered to be (or "held to be") of a certain nature -- from sellainen, "that kind of."

Or if you want to translate essive -na with "as," then you have "it is regarded as [like that]"

OK...“One holds that Bin Laden’s killing by an unknown Illinois state senator who rose to be the USA’s first black president, after ... ??? ....the biggest foreign policy accomplishment of Obama’s term of office….

I still haven’t been able to fully “unscramble” this part of the sentence:
… ja sen jälkeen suurelle osalle amerikkalaisia pettymystä tuottaneen…

The first part is: “…and it following to a big portion of Americans (in the plural partitive…???)… disappointment production…”…I get the idea but not the precise meaning …I jälkeen is a genitive postposition….and I think tuottaneen is a verbal noun in the accusative …??

[AldenG]

I couldn't tell whether you inadvertently left out an "is" or you are still having trouble connecting the beginning and the end of the sentence.

Bin Ladenin tappamista pidetään viime vuosikymmenellä tuntemattomasta Illinois'n osavaltion senaattorista Yhdysvaltain ensimmäiseksi tummaihoiseksi presidentiksi kohonneen ja sen jälkeen suurelle osalle amerikkalaisia pettymystä tuottaneen Obaman virkakauden suurimpana ulkopoliitisena saavutuksena.

This is like several sentences came speeding into a 5-point intersection where the traffic lights were out and got crunched into a single big jumble. So the most basic part of it is

Bin Ladenin tappamista pidetään Obaman virkakauden suurimpana ulkopoliittisena saavutuksena.

The killing of Bin Laden is considered/held [as] the greatest foreign policy accomplishment of Obama's term in office.

Everything else in the sentence describes Obama parenthetically.

Spoiler alert: I'm going to explain the whole thing because it's hard for me to remember after several replies which parts you've untangled and which you haven't.

pettymystä tuottaneen Obama
disappointment-having-produced Obama

suurelle osalle amerikkalaisille
to a large portion of Americans
(OK, maybe there's a better word than portion but it isn't coming to mind)

ja sen jälkeen
and thereafter

presidentiksi kohonneen
risen to president

Yhdysvaltain ensimmäiseksi tummaihoiseksi presidentiksi kohonneen
risen to [be] the U.S.A.'s first dark-skinned president

Illinoisin osavaltion senaattorista
from Senator of the State of Illinois

tuntemattomasta Illinoisin osavaltion senaattorista
from unknown Senator of the State of Illinois

viime vuosikymmenellä
in the last decade

So in sum we get:

The killing of Bin Laden is regarded as the greatest foreign-policy accomplishment of Obama's term in office, Obama this unknown Senator from the State of Illinois who rose in the last decade to become the first dark-skinned President of the United States and thereafter brought disappointment to a large part of the American people.

(In English, the "term in office" rather than just plain "Obama" almost kills the sentence, requiring repetition of the name in order to run on.)

If I heard this on the radio news I'd gather all the pieces in real time but I'm not sure I'd remember, by the time "suurimpana saavutuksena" came around, what the the original point of the sentence had been. I haven't figured out quite how one recognizes in real time which clumps belong together, though there are typically slight bumps in the pronunciation that help to delimit them. And of course a bunch of words in the same case signal that they're modifying the same part of the thought. But with "suurelle osalle amerikkalaisille pettymystä tuottaneen," you're not done yet at pettymystä. And you're not entirely done at tuottaneen, either.

You just get used to hearing and anticipating certain things. I wanted to say that you keep going until there's a nominative or accusative, but that actually doesn't fit this sentence, either. There are just patterns of cases your brain gets used to processing. Some of them feel complete and others don't.

For instance, when there are all those -ksi in a row, there are only certain things that normally come after them. One of them is a participle like kohonnut/kohonneen. Similarly, after pidetään in a news sentence you're most expecting a ___na in there somewhere. None of the parenthetical thoughts "fit the coupling" on pidetään so you have this feeling of it hanging there incomplete the whole time -- at least until memory fails with buffer overrun. If I thought about it, I'm sure there are a couple of other common completions for pidetään, but the point is it's a limited set that you come either subconsciously or consciously to anticipate.

Obviously all of us study at first. And in fact, there's a place for deliberate study at practically any stage of mastery. But there is also some point at which you stop steering the bike on purpose and let reflexes take over. Few bike riders can explain how that works, either. Anyone who has become reasonably comfortable in understanding Finnish knows far more about these patterns than they are aware of knowing or could ever hope to explain. Of course what you're doing now is the best way we know right now for an adult to reach that point. But much as with riding a bicycle, one hopes eventually to reach a certain velocity of processing input so that a different and more powerful (but also more mysterious) form of learning can begin.

[AldenG]

I guess part of what brings the bicycle analogy to mind is imagining the difficulty of understanding this sentence one word at a time. That's just too slow to stay upright. To puzzle out a sentence like this, you really need to be able to perceive the little functional groups I used above to explain it.

[Rob A.]

Obviously all of us study at first. And in fact, there's a place for deliberate study at practically any stage of mastery. But there is also some point at which you stop steering the bike on purpose and let reflexes take over. Few bike riders can explain how that works, either. Anyone who has become reasonably comfortable in understanding Finnish knows far more about these patterns than they are aware of knowing or could ever hope to explain. Of course what you're doing now is the best way we know right now for an adult to reach that point. But much as with riding a bicycle, one hopes eventually to reach a certain velocity of processing input so that a different and more powerful (but also more mysterious) form of learning can begin.

Nice explanation...even with my limited knowledge, occasionally Finnish will just come without conscious thought, and I surprise myself....but it's still only simple stuff and it's not all that often....

As for bike riding that's a good analogy....essentially the bike will go where your eyes are looking.... Trying looking across to the other side of the street for several seconds then quickly look down and see where your front wheel is pointing ...

Oh, yes...and try thinking about what happens when you turn the front wheel... If you really think about it, you will confuse yourself.: Actually you are not "turning" anything, you are applying force in the opposite direction....(Newton's Laws of Motion...Third Law). If you apply enough force in the opposite direction, your bike will head into the direction you want.... Just thought you might like to know than some of us have nothing better to do than try to figure out what is actually going on when one is riding a bicycle ...

If you don't believe me, I found this ...

http://www.tudelft.nl/live/binaries/e27 ... cycles.pdf

....apparently this all happens subconsciously, in a split second.... But now that you are thinking about it, you'll probably fall off the bike...

[AldenG]

That's a good little article. I just started breaking in a new bike today, actually, which is probably why the analogy came to mind. Did 20-some miles on our nearby rails-to-trails path where the pavement is still relatively new and smooth and the grades are gradual enough for one or two locomotives.

[David O.]

Alden has nicely dissected my sentence already, but I'll just add one point, which is that there is one particular grammatical feature of Finnish which makes the sentence possible: the ability to use a past participle as an ordinary adjective.

English can't do this. When you say "a tired man", you're not really deriving the form "tired" from the verb "tire", you're just thinking of tired as an adjective meaning "having little or no energy left" (note that we say "I am tired", whereas if we were thinking of it as a verb form, we'd say "I have tired", or maybe in the passive, "I have been tired"). And as such, this isn't really a productive structure in English, because we can't regularly form adjectives in this way. But Finnish can. Väsynyt mies = a man who has become tired, syönyt mies = a man who has eaten, Siperiaan lähtenyt mies = a man who has left for Siberia, etc.

So this is why "Obama, who has brought disappointment" can turn into the more compact pettymystä tuottanut Obama (in the original sentence, of course, that phrase was in the genitive, because it was pettymystä tuottaneen Obaman virkakauden..., "having-brought-disappointment Obama's term in office"). And once that fundamental structure is in place, there's no limit to how many modifiers you can tack on (what kind of disappointment? To who? When? What caused it? Etc). Same thing goes for presidentiksi kohonnut Obama, "Obama, who has risen to the presidency"... again, kohonneen is just the genitive form.

I think the direct object of this sentence is ...Obaman virkakauden suurimpana ulkopoliitisena saavutuksena.

Fundamental logical error here: if something is in the essive case, it can't possibly be the direct object. I'd analyze the sentence as follows:
1) impersonal, no subject, main verb pidetään
2) direct object Bin Ladenin tappamista, in the partitive, because this sense of pitää always requires the partitive
3) object complement Obaman virkakauden suurimpana ulkopoliitisena saavutuksena
4) all the other junk in the middle is an adjectival modifier of Obama.

and I think tuottaneen is a verbal noun in the accusative …??

You need to change your default settings a little, so to speak; when in doubt, always assume genitive rather than accusative. If it's accusative, you'll feel it clearly enough anyway, because it will be following a verb, pretty much adhering to English word order. (Of course, as I've said before, I still don't think it's helpful to draw a distinction between genitive and accusative in Finnish, period. But if you insist on doing so, you at least need to give yourself a more useful starting assumption).

[AldenG]

It seems to me that English can use the past participle adjectivally, but only when the noun it modifies is the object of the action. Thus we can talk about "the flattened man" even though "flattened" is not necessarily an adjective in its own right. (That's open to interpretation, of course, as I imagine it would be in most viable examples.) But if we say "the eaten man" we are talking about the man who became food. We can't talk about "the ten tacos eaten man" the way Finnish can. Nor "the ten cans flattened man," to return to the first example, though we can talk about "the thoroughly flattened man," where thoroughly rather emphasizes, I think, the verbal quality of "flattened."

Or maybe you're going to explain there's a more specific term other than adjectival for these examples.

Anyway, in Finnish litistetty mies and litistänyt mies have roughly equal versatility, which they do not in English, and I think that's your main point. One of the lesser challenges of learning Finnish is learning to correctly distinguish and use the passive and active participles which correspond to a single word in English.

Swedish has an alternate form of "Have you eaten" (Har du ätit) which is "Are you eaten" (Är du ätit). Maybe "alternate" is too strong a word. I got the impression it's probably standard dialect in some Northern backwater but those who don't speak that dialect sometimes use it just for fun, precisely because it sounds strange -- like a Minnesotan imitating Cajun dialect or something.

[David O.]

It seems to me that English can use the past participle adjectivally, but only when the noun it modifies is the object of the action.

Ack, yes, of course... that was sloppy terminology on my part. I should have specified that what English can't use adjectivally is the past active participle, or alternatively, the form which in Swedish is called the supine (i.e. the verb form that we use when forming compound tenses such as the present perfect and past perfect; of course, in English, that form doesn't have a special name and is identical to the past passive participle, but conceptually, it's a different thing).

And Swedish represents an interesting comparison point here, a sort of grammatical middle ground between English and Finnish. Namely, Swedish has different forms for the supine and the past passive participle (like Finnish), but (like English) cannot use the supine adjectivally.

an eaten man - en äten man - syöty mies (past passive participle)
I have eaten - jag har ätit - olen syönyt (supine)
a man who has eaten - en man som har ätit - syönyt mies (past active participle in Finnish, identical structure in English and Swedish, *en ätit man is impossible)

"Är du ätit?" definitely sounds backwater to me, I wouldn't call it an alternative form. But it occurs to me that English has a ubiquitous example of the same idea, one which only the most hard-core prescriptivist would consider the least bit non-standard: "Are you done/finished?" So no, these sorts of structures aren't impossible. But in English, they're random oddities, whereas in Finnish, they represent a fundamental aspect of the way the language is put together.

[Rob A.]

Fundamental logical error here: if something is in the essive case, it can't possibly be the direct object. I'd analyze the sentence as follows:
1) impersonal, no subject, main verb pidetään
2) direct object Bin Ladenin tappamista, in the partitive, because this sense of pitää always requires the partitive
3) object complement Obaman virkakauden suurimpana ulkopoliitisena saavutuksena
4) all the other junk in the middle is an adjectival modifier of Obama.

Thanks....correct me if I'm wrong...other than copular setnences where there is no object, of course, direct objects can only be in the partitive or genitive/accusative..???

Part of my confusion here was with the word, tappamista....I assumed that to be in the elative case....because of the -sta suffix...this is an error I frequently make, unfortunately. [Although in this instance, the difference is so slight....tappmista v. tappamasta ] .... And I then thought: 'Well, the elative case cannot be the direct object.' Oh well...

and I think tuottaneen is a verbal noun in the accusative …??

You need to change your default settings a little, so to speak; when in doubt, always assume genitive rather than accusative. If it's accusative, you'll feel it clearly enough anyway, because it will be following a verb, pretty much adhering to English word order. (Of course, as I've said before, I still don't think it's helpful to draw a distinction between genitive and accusative in Finnish, period. But if you insist on doing so, you at least need to give yourself a more useful starting assumption).

Good points....and I understand....I realize that the accusative case is not considered a "fully fledged" Finnish case by many grammarians... Here's a paper that discusses this... At this point, though, I still think of the accusative case as a useful grammatical "handle"...until I get a better understanding of the Finnish genitive case...