Useiden pelätään kuolleen...

[Rob A.]

So I guess according to Karlsson, in English these are called a present temporal construction (tullessani kotiin) and past temporal construction (tultuani kotiin). He does call the latter a partitive form but then he is deeply enmeshed in Latinate conceptualization. I am still unable to see that as anything other than a lexical illusion, not least because of the opposite voices involved. But if the only "a"s available come from a bucket labeled "partitive endings," it lies near to hand to call this a partitive form regardless of the questionable semantics.

I suppose a question ...at least for linguists ...could be how did this "partitive" ending come to be there... What is its role? How is this ending distinguishing itself from other possible endings...say, accusative/genitive? Or no suffix at all?...

As for being "deeply enmeshed in Latinate conceptualization", I think it is very difficult for academic grammarians not to be.... It's such a fundamental part of the scholarly tradition.... and it was actually developed 2,000 years ago. I was reading the other night that in, I think it was the first century AD, the Romans....well, those who cared about such things... were quite concerned about the poor quality of Latin that was being spoken, particularly within Rome itself.....there were so many immigrants and non-native speakers pouring in, that the language was being butchered. So they set about to improve their language schooling techniques.... And this same fundamental framework is still with us...

Linguists and grammarians still "shoe-horn" various languages into this basic Roman-developed framework...

Is there a better way? Well...I won't be holding my breath....

Oh yes...reflexive verbs...where the action of the verb is upon the subject of the sentence all seem to have the -ua suffix.... However so do many intransitive verbs and not all intransitive verbs are reflexive... My example paistua is not reflexive. But now I'm curious how you might develop a reflexive sentence with paistua...probably by using itse.... Maybe, tomorrow, I'll start a new thread on that ...

[AldenG]

You're awakening dormant brain cells for me.

And you're right, VISK reminds me that there are reflexive and automative meanings (often of the same verb):

Kun normaali-ihoinen peseytyy saippuan kera, ihon rasvat peseytyvät osittain pois.
VISK § 334

And furthermore some in -utua are derivative passive (johdospassiiviset) verbs, where a passive meaning is introduced in an active form by changing the stem of the verb:

Ovi avattiin. first person passive
Ovi avautui. derivative passive
VISK § 336

So what would it be to grill oneself on the beach? Paistautua?

[Rob A.]

...And furthermore some in -utua are derivative passive (johdospassiiviset) verbs, where a passive meaning is introduced in an active form by changing the stem of the verb:

Ovi avattiin. first person passive
Ovi avautui. derivative passive
VISK § 336

Yes....kind of like deponent verbs in Latin, except the other way around.... And yet more rationale for not getting too bogged down in the arcana of grammatical constructions.... A basic understanding of grammar, intuitive or through study, is helpful... but practice, practice, practice with the day to day use of the language is primary....

I started reading that PHD thesis on Non-finite Constructions in Finnish by Koskinen, that I mentioned above...http://finlandforum.org/posting.php?mod ... 9&p=431370#

In her introduction she makes the point that the "standard" grammar categories are just not adequate enough to capture the nature of participles and even infinitive forms. Nominally, under the "Latinate conceptualization" they may seem to be nouns or adjectives. But often, though not consistently, they still retain varying degrees of their verbal attributes, such that "pigeonholing" can be problematic. The distinction between participles and infinitives revolves around the temporal nature of participles and the non-temporal nature of infinitives. But she makes the point that even these distinctions are not consistent. In other words, not all infinitives nor all participles are the same, even among themselves ...

Her focus is on Finnish, but she mentions that such issues crop up in other languages as well, including English....

[onkko]

As normal your discussion goes way over my head but i have to throw in -ttua sentence i heard last weekend.
I asked my friend why he looks so sad and aswer was "Ko tuli sanottua" (Ko = kun in book finnish.) and of course i knew that what he said wasnt anything good and that was burst instead of planned and saying was against his own best. Maybe what he said wasnt even exactly truth or atleast it was twisted to hurt most. How did i know all this? I dont know but i do

[AldenG]

answer was "Ko tuli sanottua" (Ko = kun in book finnish.)

That's a good example for this discussion because it's sort of the opposite of what I was saying.

Normally sanottu means "[is/was] said by someone," which is why it's called passive. It's closely related to sanottiin.

But in Sanottuani tarpeeksi lähdin kotiin ("After I [had] said enough, I went home") (kinda crappy example, I know, but I have trouble thinking things up out of the blue). Here it is "I said", and it's active, closely related to sanoin, and you'd logically expect it to be some variation of sanonut, not a variation of sanottu. The expression should have become something like "sanonuttani tarpeeksi," but that's just not the way Finnish developed. I was saying that the "a" in sanottuani helps tell us it's this backwards kind of sanottu and not the usual kind.

But In tuli sanottua, the a is still there but it's back to meaning "it got said", not "I said" or "he said" or "we said." (Well, actually it implies your friend said it, but it still means "a bunch of stuff got said.")

So in a way it contradicts what I was saying. One sanottua refers to a sanottiin and the other refers to a sanoin.

But at the same time it strongly points out what I've often said before, which is that in Finnish even more than in many other languages, you can't completely describe what any single word/forms do in isolation, and you shouldn't try. You can only describe what they do in set phrases.

Tuli sanottua is just a different kind of animal than sanottuani tarpeeksi.

Sanottu or sanottua by itself is not really a building block in Finnish. It's one of the pieces you get when you take a hammer and break a real building block into smaller pieces. Most of the real building blocks are two words, sometimes three words, and occasionally more words than that. They're not quite the same thing as an idiom but they're analogous.

In English, "near" is a building block. I live near Jim. It was near closing time.

In Finnish, lähi is NOT a building block. In fact, lähellä isn't quite a full building block, either. ____n lähellä and lähellä ____ä are the true building blocks. Most of the time, breaking them down any farther is a waste of time that will slow someone's absorption of the language. It doesn't even matter that the word is lähi in adessiivi. Focusing on details like that pretty much guarantees a teacher will lose the academically unsophisticated students in the class, and I'm sure that includes most of the students in most Finnish-for-foreigners classes.

You can get away with that kind of stuff teaching English or Swedish because in that respect, both languages have less than 1/10th of the complexity. Even if you teach all the grammatical detail, there's still not so much of it. Learners can string single words together with the idea that one word = one brick and they'll come out pretty well.

But that just doesn't work teaching Finnish. The main reason for the overwhelming failure of Finnish-for-foreigners instruction in the last 20 years is the tendency for most curricula and teachers to use the wrong building blocks and teach too much largely needless, confusing, and obstructive detail. And that's official. The working group that reported in two years ago said largely the same thing in a more abstract way.

Now we'll just have to see if anything changes in the classroom. I'd love to be part of that, but we can't seem to get free of our projects and commitments here in the U.S. very quickly. Progress since two summers ago is depressingly little.

[AldenG]

There is definitely no implied or omitted että in any of these common constructs built on ttua/ttyä:
(Well, not by itself. There is, however, an implied sen jälkeen, että [myrsky iski].)

I’d rather use kun. (sen jälkeen, kun [myrsky iski])

I'm almost certain I would use kun, too, in the normal unexamined course of things. (Sometimes writing about about something is like explaining how you tie your shoelace, especially if it's something where you don't have rock-solid native certitude. But even writing about English for me, I'm not always positive what I'd use spontaneously, if I weren't thinking about it and asking myself questions about it. It's vaguely Heisenbergish I guess.)

So I had a second thought about stating categorically "no implied or omitted että" because I wasn't certain you could not use että in place of kun, and I went back and quickly threw in the parenthetical. As a hasty afterthought, it came out sounding like a prescription rather than a *well, except maybe...* and introduced one error from trying not to make another.

[Rob A.]

...But that just doesn't work teaching Finnish. The main reason for the overwhelming failure of Finnish-for-foreigners instruction in the last 20 years is the tendency for most curricula and teachers to use the wrong building blocks and teach too much largely needless, confusing, and obstructive detail. And that's official. The working group that reported in two years ago said largely the same thing in a more abstract way.

Now we'll just have to see if anything changes in the classroom. I'd love to be part of that, but we can't seem to get free of our projects and commitments here in the U.S. very quickly. Progress since two summers ago is depressingly little.

Yes....I can accept this...I suppose it comes down to "pattern recognition"... I think native speakers would intitutively construct the examples below correctly:

1. Havaitsin karhun syömässä marjoja.
...this would be: "I saw the bear eating berries." ...I think you could also say: Havaitsin karhun ja havaitsin että se söi marjoja...."I saw the bear and I saw that it was eating berries."

2. En havainnut karhua syömässä marjoja.
..."I did not see the bear eating berries."....En havainnut karhua ja en havainnut että se söi marjoja...."I did not see the bear and I did not see that it was eating berries."

3. Havaitsin karhun syövän marjoja...."I saw that the bear was eating berries."
I don't think you could say this any other way...???

4. En havainnut karhun syövän marjoja...."I did not see that the bear was eating berries."
Again I think that's it...

....but I wonder how you could teach this to adult learners..??... Maybe you just have to go over it until it sinks in... Practice....

It seems to me that the "third infinitive form syömässä is more noun-like than the active present participle...syövä...

In other words syövä seems to retain more of its verbal attributes.... And maybe recognizing that, is enough to trigger the recollection that karhu is not the object of havaita but rather the subject of a genitive compliment.... Any comments?? Also, have I used marjoja correctly or is there it problem with it???

[Rob A.]

As normal your discussion goes way over my head but i have to throw in -ttua sentence i heard last weekend.
I asked my friend why he looks so sad and aswer was "Ko tuli sanottua" (Ko = kun in book finnish.) and of course i knew that what he said wasnt anything good and that was burst instead of planned and saying was against his own best. Maybe what he said wasnt even exactly truth or atleast it was twisted to hurt most. How did i know all this? I dont know but i do

Well...you have one big advantage, though...when you speak Finnish people understand what you're saying...when I TRY to speak Finnish their ears bleed.....

For me trying to understand the grammar is my way of forcing additional "brain-wiring" so that I can "think Finnish"... My "default position" is always back to "English logic"....

I should also add that my French...poor as it is, did not seem to require this degree of grammatical analysis.... When I speak ...if I know the vocabulary...which can be a problem...the language just flows out.... Maybe because Finnish is just that much different from French....

[onkko]

"I saw the bear eating berries."

Wicious berries! I knew there is meat eating plants but berries who eat bears!
Ill get my coat.

[Rob A.]

"I saw the bear eating berries."

Wicious berries! I knew there is meat eating plants but berries who eat bears!
Ill get my coat.

Darn...I was afraid of that.... "Back to the drawing board!"... I'll try to figure out what I did wrong ...

[Edit: So apparently you were joking:

Havaitsin karhujen syövät marjat.... ]

[Rob A.]

going back to the original sentence for a moment:

Useiden pelätään kuolleen myrskyn iskettyä festivaalialueelle Belgiassa.

"Several feared dead after storm struck festival area in Belgium."

If it were all present tense:

"Several feared dying while storm strikes festival area in Belgium."

Would that be:

Useiden pelätään kuolevan (....kuolemassa..??) myrskyn iskettävää festivaalialueelle Belgiassa.....??

[Jukka Aho]

[Edit: So apparently you were joking:

Havaitsin karhujen syövät marjat.... :wink: ]

In Finnish, “bear-eating berries” would be realized either as karhuja syövät marjat (descriptive phrase) or as karhujasyövät marjat (where karhujasyövä is an ad-hoc adjectival “label” for characterizing and categorizing the type of the said berries.) The choice between using a descriptive phrase (two words) or a single compound word is sometimes a bit fuzzy but using a compound makes it sound more like an “established term” for the phenomenon.

[Jukka Aho]

If it were all present tense:

"Several feared dying while storm strikes festival area in Belgium."

Would that be:

Useiden pelätään kuolevan (....kuolemassa..??) myrskyn iskettävää festivaalialueelle Belgiassa.....??

Present tense with focus on the predicted/likely future events:

Useiden pelätään kuolevan myrskyn iskiessä festivaalialueelle Belgiassa.

That phrase is a bit strange, though... it reads as if we knew that the storm will be strong enough to kill people. It also suggests the storm is inevitably, with 100% certainty, going to hit the festival area. There’s also the underlying assumption that the festival guests are not aware of being in danger, or at least apparently not going to seek for shelter or flee from the path of the storm.

Present tense with focus on the currently on-going events:

Useiden pelätään olevan (parhaillaan) kuolemassa myrskyn (juuri) iskettyä festivaalialueelle Belgiassa.

That’s OK, except pelätään olevan kuolemassa, while grammatically correct, is also not a phrase you’d actually use in a news story. It makes “dying” sound too much like a set process with a certain outcome. (Now you’re 10% dead... 50% dead... 90% dead... 99%... done!)

Normally you’d say something like “Useiden (ihmisten) pelätään olevan hengenvaarassa”.

[Rob A.]

Thanks Jukka...