Questions & Answers about Lähdemme Saksasta tänään.
In English we say "leaving Germany", so why does the Finnish sentence use the "from" ending in Saksasta?
The Finnish verb lähteä (to leave) requires you to express where you are departing from. It pairs with the elative case ending -sta or -stä (meaning "out of" or "from"). While in English you just leave a place, in Finnish you always leave from a place.
Why is the ending on Saksa (Germany) -sta and not -stä?
This is because of vowel harmony. The word Saksa contains the back vowel 'a'. Therefore, you must use the back-vowel version of the elative ending, which is -sta.
The dictionary word for "to leave" is lähteä. Why is there a 'd' in lähdemme?
This happens because of a spelling rule called consonant gradation. When we add personal endings like the "we" ending -mme, the strong 't' in the middle of lähteä weakens into a 'd', becoming lähde-. Then we add the -mme to get lähdemme.
Where is the word for "we" in this sentence?
The Finnish pronoun for "we" is me, but you don't actually need it here. The verb ending -mme in lähdemme already tells us exactly who is doing the action, so the pronoun is very often dropped.
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