Word
He syövät keittoa ja leipää.
Meaning
They eat soup and bread.
Part of speech
sentence
Pronunciation
Course
Questions & Answers about He syövät keittoa ja leipää.
Why are both keittoa and leipää in the partitive case instead of their basic forms?
In this sentence, soup and bread are "mass nouns" (substances you don't typically count one by one). Because the people are eating an unspecified amount of them (just "some" soup and "some" bread, not all of it), Finnish uses the partitive case for the object.
How do you form the partitive for the basic words keitto and leipä?
For many words ending in a single short vowel, you form the partitive by simply adding -a or -ä to the end. Therefore, keitto becomes keittoa, and leipä becomes leipää.
Why does keittoa end with -a, but leipää ends with -ä?
This is a great example of vowel harmony in action! Keitto contains the back vowel o, so it must take the back-vowel ending -a. Leipä contains the front vowel ä, so it takes the front-vowel ending -ä. The vowels e and i are neutral and do not affect the ending.
Why is the verb syövät here instead of just syö?