Helsinki pitää kolmen aseman Pisara-rataa parhaana

[Bavarian]

One of YLE's articles today is titled Helsinki pitää kolmen aseman Pisara-rataa parhaana, which has me mildly baffled. The thing is, I recognize all the words individually, but the cases don't seem to be working together -- or, at least, aren't working in my favor.

The big problem is the word pitää, which has about 19227 different meanings and can take an object in any of a bunch of cases. If it's taking the genitive/accusative, then the first four words would suggest "Helsinki is keeping three stations", presumably a reference to the three stations other than the Central station that are on the map as part of various alternatives for the planned pisararata, although I'm not quite certain why that's in the partitive. And I'm really drawing a blank on what paras is doing in the essive.

I mean, I get the basic gist of the article that the authorities are going through various plans for the pisararata and making a selection based on how it will affect the buildings above. (God forbid Helsinki should get a giant sinkhole while they're building the track!) But the grammar is just making me throw my hands up in the air.

[Rob A.]

I think pitää in this context means something like "considers"....so the sentence would mean, "Helsinki considers the/a three station Pisara railway as best." The word, rataa, is partitive because the action is incomplete, and parhaana is essive, because this is an ongoing "state".

Well...something like that...

[Bavarian]

Ah, so it's one of the several thousand other meanings of pitää.

I was just looking up pitää on Wiktionary, and noticed this definition:

(transitive) Used in very many collocations with nouns, translated often into "engage in", "have", "do", "transact" , "pursue", "conduct", "carry out" "keep up", "maintain" etc.

I can't help but think of Humpty Dumpty's line in Through the Looking Glass:

“I don’t know what you mean by ‘glory,’ ” Alice said.
Humpty Dumpty smiled contemptuously. “Of course you don’t—till I tell you. I meant ‘there’s a nice knock-down argument for you!’ ”
“But ‘glory’ doesn’t mean ‘a nice knock-down argument’,” Alice objected.
“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.”

I guess the Finns are just using pitää to mean whatever they want and make life difficult for us learners.

[Upphew]

I guess the Finns are just using pitää to mean whatever they want and make life difficult for us learners.

Minä pidän sinusta, Helsinki pitää kolmen aseman Pisara-radasta.

[jahasjahas]

Used in very many collocations with nouns, translated often into "engage in", "have", "do", "transact" , "pursue", "conduct", "carry out" "keep up", "maintain" etc.
--
I guess the Finns are just using pitää to mean whatever they want and make life difficult for us learners.

Pitää has a few different meanings, sure, but the collocations are similar to those that use have in English. Have a party, have a fit, have fun... You don't have to think about the meaning of the verb itself, just the meaning of the phrase.

(Have has more definitions than pitää, but I suppose the Merriam-Webster editors are more thorough than Wiktionary editors:
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/have )

[Rip]

Oluesta pitäviä pidätysvaikeuksellisia pidätetettyjä pidetään kuulustelujen pitämisen kannalta ongelmallisina...?

[Upphew]

Tämä pitää kääntää englanniksi pitäytyen yhdessä pitää-sanan merkityksessä?

Oluesta pitäviä pidätysvaikeuksellisia pidätetettyjä pidetään kuulustelujen pitämisen kannalta ongelmallisina...?

[AldenG]

As others have said in other words, the basic model here is:

(Subject) pitää sitä _____na

or in this case pitää rataa parhaana. Recognizing this larger construct, one of the most common ones for pitää, goes quite a long way toward disambiguating the verb's meaning. It's a little more complicated here because rataa is modified by kolmen aseman and Pisara-, and that must surely be what distracted you from recognizing the pattern. It's easy to read a genitive/accusative ending as an object rather than a modifier of the actual object. So the sentence starts out being ambiguous, but the sitä _____na is such a strong clue that it will normally bump you back into the correct interpretation.

It all serves to remind how important it is not to learn each verb as an isolated word (and its many inflections) but as part of the handful of larger structures into which every verb will fall. But even then one sometimes just gets off on the wrong foot with a sentence, even in a first language. For my part, I find this sentence a slightly strange thing to be saying -- not because of how it's said, but because of what is said. It's not the sort of thing I'd normally have an opinion about, much less expect to hear survey results about. That's another potentially disorienting factor and my spontaneous reaction was to read it a second time to see if I had misread something.

[jahasjahas]

For my part, I find this sentence a slightly strange thing to be saying -- not because of how it's said, but because of what is said. It's not the sort of thing I'd normally have an opinion about, much less expect to hear survey results about. That's another potentially disorienting factor and my spontaneous reaction was to read it a second time to see if I had misread something.

We're talking about the opinion of the city board (kaupunginhallitus), not a survey. (Unless I misunderstood your misunderstanding.)

[AldenG]

We're talking about the opinion of the city board (kaupunginhallitus), not a survey. (Unless I misunderstood your misunderstanding.)

What I get for not looking at the link, I suppose. It didn't seem necessary for explaining the sentence.

It's interesting all the conclusions one must jump to using a minimum of information in interpreting even ordinary sentences, but especially headlines. Already with Helsinki pitää, you have to decide whether it's Helsinki as a who or a what, though you get to go back and revise that first assumption in the light of the rest of the sentence. Only a thinking entity can pitää ____na, or at least I can't come up with a different scenario on the spot.

Obviously Helsingin kaupunki (as a political entity) or some board thereof is a better assumption (more likely to be the intended meaning) than "the people of Helsinki" or "a majority of Helsinkians" but it was not my instantaneous first choice on this occasion. And then it also came at the end of a 14-hour stretch of programming and debugging, which hardly helps.