Questions & Answers about Hänellä on vanha kello.
Why does this sentence use hänellä on instead of a verb for "to have"?
Finnish doesn't actually have a single verb that means "to have." Instead, you use a structure that literally translates to "at someone is something." Here, the pronoun hän (he/she) takes the -llä ending (meaning "at"), followed by on (is). So literally, the sentence says "At him is an old watch."
The translation says "He has", but could hänellä on also mean "She has"?
Yes! The base pronoun hän means both "he" and "she" because Finnish doesn't use gendered pronouns. Depending on the context, hänellä on can safely be translated as "he has" or "she has".
Why are vanha kello in their basic forms?
In this Finnish "to have" structure, the thing being owned (vanha kello) is actually the grammatical subject of the sentence (remember, literally it means "At him is an old watch"). The subject in this type of sentence stays in the basic, unchanged form (the nominative case).
Where is the word for "an" in the Finnish sentence?
Finnish does not have articles like "a", "an", or "the". The words vanha kello can mean "an old watch" or "the old watch" depending entirely on what makes sense in the context of the conversation.
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