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Questions & Answers about Äiti käyttää mediaa.
How do we change the verb in this sentence to the past tense, and what happens to the consonant gradation?
To say 'Mother used', you change the verb to Äiti käytti. The past tense marker is -i. Notice that the double tt stays strong here! That is because the third-person singular ending doesn't close the syllable. If you wanted to say 'I used', the syllable closes and the tt weakens to a single t: minä käytin.
Why is the word for media in the partitive case (mediaa)?
Why does käyttää have two ä's at the end?
For most Type 1 verbs, the third-person singular (he/she/it) present tense doubles the final vowel of the stem. The stem here is käyttä-, so doubling the vowel gives käyttää. It just happens to look exactly like the dictionary infinitive form!
The word mediaa has both 'e' and 'a' vowels. Why does it take the back vowel -a ending instead of -ä?
Media is an international loanword. Loanwords sometimes mix front and back vowels. When adding an ending, you usually match the last vowel of the base word. Since media ends in the back vowel a, it takes the back vowel -a for the partitive ending.