Loulujoutsenia vs loulujoutsenet

[Satish]

I have been listenening to YLE's Selkouutiset to improve my comprehension skills and I came across two sentences in an article about swans that are testing my grammatical skills...

1) Laulujoutsenia elää melkein koko Suomessa.
2) Laulujoutsenet elävät veden äärellä.

Both have the verb elää and adverbs of position so the meaning difference should be in the subject i.e. partitive vs nominative. Here is my guess...

1) Swans live almost in the whole of Finland, maybe not all swans but most, an indefinite amount of the whole. The rest could be in Russia..
2) ALL swans live at the edge of water. No exceptions.

Have I got this right??

[Vellamo]

Yep! Well done!

[Satish]

Yep! Well done!

Hey thanks! Actually on this topic of partitive subjects, I came across this in my notes today.

Subject in the partitive - verb - locative adverb expresses an "universal truth". Eg
Kaloja ui vedessä. - Fish swim in the water.
The verbs which can be used include olla, seisoa, asua, istua, näkyvä, tulla, syntyä, uida, jne. The verbs are typically verbs of motion, change of state where the subject is not "highly active".

I don´t know the exact reference from where I got this, but would like to get any opinion on it...

[Rob A.]

Yep! Well done!

Hey thanks! Actually on this topic of partitive subjects, I came across this in my notes today.

Subject in the partitive - verb - locative adverb expresses an "universal truth". Eg
Kaloja ui vedessä. - Fish swim in the water.
The verbs which can be used include olla, seisoa, asua, istua, näkyvä, tulla, syntyä, uida, jne. The verbs are typically verbs of motion, change of state where the subject is not "highly active". http://finlandforum.org/posting.php?mod ... 4&p=403804#

I don´t know the exact reference from where I got this, but would like to get any opinion on it...

OK...I'll cautiously stick my toe into this water, so to speak...

I don't think that "Kaloja ui vedessä" expresses a universal truth so much as a statement that an indefinite number of fish "...swim in the water." It almost seems like an existential sentence, but it isn't ...the plural partitive is used because the number of fish is indefinite, I suppose it's a general statement. Here's a link to previous thread on this issue:
viewtopic.php?f=9&t=45375

And I think your first example and explanation are pretty good. I would translate, Laulujoutsenia elää melkein koko Suomessa. as equivalent to, "There are swans living in almost all of Finland."... I think I'm right here, but maybe not.... This might be an existential sentence, elää may be equivalent to on, but I'm not sure... At least, though, it can be considered as having a similar grammatical role as to kaloja...in this case the subject is in the plural partitive because it refers to an indefinite number of swans...

[sammy]

1) Laulujoutsenia elää melkein koko Suomessa.

1) Swans live almost in the whole of Finland, maybe not all swans but most, an indefinite amount of the whole. The rest could be in Russia..

Have I got this right??

Well not quite...

The sentence does not imply that all of those swans live in Finland - it just means that (some) swans can be found living in almost all parts of Finland. That is, you can see swans in almost all parts of the country, and in maybe in some other countries too - swans are not that fussy about geographical or political boundaries, bless their yellow socks

[Satish]

I don't think that "Kaloja ui vedessä" expresses a universal truth so much as a statement that an indefinite number of fish "...swim in the water." It almost seems like an existential sentence, but it isn't ...the plural partitive is used because the number of fish is indefinite, I suppose it's a general statement. Here's a link to previous thread on this issue:
viewtopic.php?f=9&t=45375

Rob, thanks for reminding me about that thread. Sorry that I repeated myself...

swans are not that fussy about geographical or political boundaries, bless their yellow socks

LOL! Try explaining the etymology of that to someone!!!!!

[AldenG]

I don't think that "Kaloja ui vedessä" expresses a universal truth so much as a statement that an indefinite number of fish "...swim in the water." It almost seems like an existential sentence, but it isn't ...the plural partitive is used because the number of fish is indefinite, I suppose it's a general statement.

Indeed, to build on your foundation here, the sentence is a statement about the water, not about the fish. Although "[some] fish" is the grammatical subject of the verb, the notional subject of the sentence is the water and the fact that it contains fish. It is another way of saying

Tässä vedessä ui kaloja.

Here, too, the grammatical subject is kaloja but the "anchor" of the sentence is the water, which is being further qualified by the fact that there are fish in it.

[AldenG]

I looked up laulujoutsen in my pictographic dictionary and got this:



So these are scattered throughout Finland?

[Rob A.]

....Indeed, to build on your foundation here, the sentence is a statement about the water, not about the fish. Although "[some] fish" is the grammatical subject of the verb, the notional subject of the sentence is the water and the fact that it contains fish. It is another way of saying

Tässä vedessä ui kaloja.

Here, too, the grammatical subject is kaloja but the "anchor" of the sentence is the water, which is being further qualified by the fact that there are fish in it.

I'm not sure I can totally agree with you here, Alden.... It seems that trying to understand this and explain it, has been a source of dispute among Finnish linguists for decades. And apparently the Finnish existential sentence is a more complicated "animal" that it is in English..... Some of the sources I've read would suggest that: "Kaloja ui vedessä,....is an existential sentence; others that it is not, and that the reason, "kaloja", is in the partitive is because the importance of the partitive case is such in Finnish that it can even "trump" the nominative case as the subject of a sentence where "indefiniteness" is a critical aspect of the subject noun....

Here are a couple of links...I've posted the first one before, the "existential sentence" discussion is near the bottom. The second one I've just found and it seems to be a well written paper....as best as I can tell it was written in the late 1970's...likely some sort of academic thesis....

1. http://www.ielanguages.com/finnish.html

2. http://ifa.amu.edu.pl/psicl/files/7/09_Chesterman.pdf

In the face of this I think for most of us it will just be one of those things where we come know what makes sense and what doesn't without fully understanding why?....

[Pursuivant]

So these are scattered throughout Finland?

Looks more like an Icelandic bird to me that

[AldenG]

Having skimmed through the Chesterman article, Rob, my entirely amateur reaction is that too much is being made of superficial similarities between, say, Mies oli keittiössä and Keittiössä oli mies, and similarly between Kalat uivat vedessä and Vedessä ui kaloja (with its variant form Kaloja ui vedessä).

A formalistic look might say they differ by little more than a case. But I think that neurologically they spring from entirely different impulses to express different notions and only happen to devolve to lexically similar expressions. (My education in linguistics begins and ends with a single book by Chomsky 25 years ago, so it shouldn't be hard to imagine how I'd describe the impulses and devolution in more detail.)

I think this is what happens when formal systems meet reality -- particularly formal systems that transcend languages. There has been no shortage, in the world of ideas, of attempts to create various theories of everything. But often the attempt to describe all observable variations from a unified explanation end up being more complicated than the reality they describe. I don't know whether a unified theory of the partitive or even a unified theory of definiteness in Finnish is more likely to lead to clarity or to madness. Many of these old men's unified theories lead to the latter, it seems to me -- or perhaps arise from it. I worked in my small way on a few of those in my own former fields; in fact, that proclivity must be what led me to computing to begin with, since every program is really a model of some reality and every subroutine or library represents a unified theory of something or other.

Eventually I put all that stuff away and bought a well-used pickup truck. But that could be just me.

[AldenG]

No disrespect intended to the profession, of course. I know that someone has to analyze these things. For some, in fact, in the memorable words of Donald Sutherland in Animal House, back when his buns still rated cameo appearances, "This is my job."

[Rob A.]

...A formalistic look might say they differ by little more than a case. But I think that neurologically they spring from entirely different impulses to express different notions and only happen to devolve to lexically similar expressions. (My education in linguistics begins and ends with a single book by Chomsky 25 years ago, so it shouldn't be hard to imagine how I'd describe the impulses and devolution in more detail.)

I think this is what happens when formal systems meet reality -- particularly formal systems that transcend languages. There has been no shortage, in the world of ideas, of attempts to create various theories of everything. But often the attempt to describe all observable variations from a unified explanation end up being more complicated than the reality they describe. I don't know whether a unified theory of the partitive or even a unified theory of definiteness in Finnish is more likely to lead to clarity or to madness. Many of these old men's unified theories lead to the latter, it seems to me -- or perhaps arise from it. I worked in my small way on a few of those in my own former fields; in fact, that proclivity must be what led me to computing to begin with, since every program is really a model of some reality and every subroutine or library represents a unified theory of something or other. ...

.....But, of course, this is the age-old scholastic impulse..... analyze things to the point of chasing your own tail.... what humans have always done....well, a few of us anyway ....and this "unified theory" stuff is making me think of Einstein.... Now without him, how would mankind have figured out how to actually end warfare forever....the atom bomb!!! ...Well, once they start seriously throwing them around....

I suppose we should be grateful that Newton hadn't figured this stuff out...where would Einstein have gone if his "launching pad" had been an already developed Theory of Relativity?.... Anyway you know where I'm going with this...