Unohtui?

[Spencerville Slim]

So there I am listening to "Paperitähdet," an old Kinks' song renewed with lyrics by your man, Juice Leskinen. Thought I'd look up the words on-line to see if I knew any of the stars of yesteryear that he celebrates, and then - being the nerd that I am - I started wondering about the form of some of the words themselves.

Came across the line "Mutta kuka muistaa Ursulaa, hän täysin unohtui . . . " and thought that "unohtui" must be some past participle of "unohtaa" but I couldn't figure it out.

Next stop, Fintwol, the Finnish Morphological Analyzer, where it tells me that "unohtui" is the DV-U V PAST ACT SG3 not of "unohtaa" as I'd imagined, but of "unohtua," which is a brand new verb to me, and which my dictionary tells me means "to be forgotten." Oh dear. Poor Ursula .

Now, usually, I'm pretty good at doping out the Fintwol parts of speech abbreviations, but the DV-U has me stumped. I assume the V is for verb, but the D and the U? Any ideas? Any examples from other verbs? I thought that maybe this is the same form as as "tehdä - tehty," but not so, according to Fintwol.

Also assume that PAST ACT SG3 means that it a past tense, active voice (i.e.: not passive) and third person singular? Not sure about that, though.

If I recall correctly, there used to a legend on the Morphological Analyzer site that provided a key to the abbreviations but I don't see it any more. It also occurs to me that it would be a real disaster if this handy-dandy site were to disappear from the web. Is there anything else like it out there?

[AldenG]

There is a very large group of verbs ending in -ua or -yä, known as automative or reflexive verbs (depending on nuance of meaning), that refer to a process affecting the subject instead of the subject affecting something else.

Off the top of my head paisua (to swell up), paistua (to fry or roast, often in figurative meaning), kuulua (to be heard, to "carry"), muistua (to come to mind), luisua (to slip-slide, to skid) are typical representatives. In some examples there is no conceptual object and in others the grammatical subject of the sentence is the conceptual object of the sentence. Grammatically there is never a direct object with these verbs.

The "opposite" of unohtaa is muistaa; the opposite of unohtua is muistua. Although we would translate these latter two to English as "be forgotten / be remembered," the concept is subtler than the passive voice, akin to "fade away" or "endure." For instance paistui (3p past of paistua) does not suggest a doer -- it would likely be happening in the sun or a boiler room -- but paistettiin (past passive of paistaa) definitely implies in most contexts that some unspecified person or persons deliberately fried something, i.e. there is a doer.

It was clever to see the similarity to the -ttu / -tty participle, but unlike that situation, -ua / -yä is not something you "do to" the verb. It's a separate verb which sometimes (often) exists and sometimes doesn't, even where you might think that it would.

[AldenG]

Then there are the -autua and -äytyä verbs. Kantaa is to carry a thing and kantautua is to carry in the sense of sound carrying (being carried) over water. In general the sense of these verbs is often to submit oneself to a process, such as ilmoittautua to "report" in the sense of show up for processing compared to ilmoittaa, to report or announce a fact. However by that logic, one might have expected the first one to be kantua(X) instead of kantautua, yet it isn't. That's an example of what I mean that you can't manufacture one of these verbs to fit the occasion. You just have to know.