Word
Sataako ulkona? Minulla ei ole sateenvarjoa.
Meaning
Is it raining outside? I do not have an umbrella.
Part of speech
sentence
Pronunciation
Course
Breakdown of Sataako ulkona? Minulla ei ole sateenvarjoa.
olla
to be
minä
I
ulkona
outside
ei
no / not (negative verb)
Questions & Answers about Sataako ulkona? Minulla ei ole sateenvarjoa.
Why is the verb ei ole instead of en ole when the sentence is about what I do not have?
In Finnish, there is no verb for to have. The possession structure literally means on me is not. Because the grammatical subject is not I, the negative verb combination stays in the third-person singular form ei ole, no matter who we are talking about.
Why does the word for umbrella have an -a at the end (sateenvarjoa)?
This is the core rule for saying you do not have something. In a negative possession sentence, the thing you do not have must always be put in the partitive case. For the word sateenvarjo, we add the ending -a to make it partitive.
How does the word sataako work?
The base verb is sataa (it rains). To turn a statement into a yes/no question in Finnish, you add the question particle -ko or -kö to the word you are asking about. By attaching it to the verb, you change it rains into is it raining?.
The word sateenvarjo is quite long. Is it made of smaller words?
Yes, it is a compound word! Sateen means of the rain (the possessive form of sade), and varjo means shadow or shade. So an umbrella in Finnish is literally a rain shadow.