Questions & Answers about Poika juo puhdasta vettä.
Why does the word for clean end in -ta here (puhdasta)?
The base word is puhdas (clean). Because it describes the water (vettä), it has to match the water's grammatical case. Since vettä is in the partitive case, the adjective must also be in the partitive case. For words ending in -as, you usually add -ta to make it partitive, resulting in puhdasta.
Why is the water in the partitive case (vettä) instead of the basic form (vesi)?
In Finnish, you use the partitive case for the object of a sentence when it is an uncountable mass or substance, like water, coffee, or air. It shows that the boy is drinking some unspecified amount of water, not a specific, whole body of water.
Why does puhdasta get an -a ending, but vettä gets an -ä ending, if they are in the exact same case?
This is due to vowel harmony. The ending you add depends on the vowels inside the word itself. Puhdas has the back vowel u, so it takes the back vowel ending -ta. The base word for water, vesi, only has the neutral vowels e and i, which means it defaults to the front vowel ending -tä.
The base word for water is vesi. How does it become vettä?
Words ending in -si are often old Finnish words that follow special patterns. For many of these, the -si changes to a -t- stem before you can add the partitive ending. This is why vesi becomes vettä instead of just adding an ending directly to the base word.
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