Questions & Answers about Lääkärillä on kallis puhelin.
Why does the word for doctor have the -llä ending here?
Finnish doesn't have a verb for "to have". Instead, it uses the -llä or -lla ending (the adessive case) on the person who owns the thing. Lääkärillä literally means "at the doctor".
Wait, so does on mean "has" or "is"?
On is the third-person form of the verb "to be" (olla), so it means "is". The literal translation of this sentence is "At the doctor is an expensive phone." Whenever you want to say someone has something, you use this "At someone is..." structure.
Does the adjective kallis (expensive) need to take a special ending?
Not in this sentence! Adjectives must match the noun they describe. Since kallis describes the phone, and puhelin is in its basic, unchanged form (the nominative case), kallis also stays in its basic form.
How do we know it translates to "The doctor" and "an expensive phone" if there are no words for "the" or "a"?
Finnish doesn't have articles like "a", "an", or "the". You usually figure it out from context or word order. In this "having" structure, the owner (lääkärillä) comes first and is usually translated with "the", while the thing being owned (puhelin) comes last and is usually translated with "a" or "an".
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