Questions & Answers about Olen ostanut lankaa ja uuden kankaan.
How do we form the past participle ostanut from the verb ostaa?
Ostaa (to buy) is a Type 1 verb. To form the active past participle (the word used with olla to say 'have done' or 'had done'), you take the infinitive, drop the final -a or -ä, and add -nut or -nyt. Because ostaa contains the back vowels 'o' and 'a', vowel harmony dictates we use the back-vowel ending -nut, resulting in ostanut.
Why is the first object (lankaa) in the partitive case, while the second object (uuden kankaan) is in the genitive-accusative case?
This is a great example of how Finnish treats uncountable versus countable objects in the same sentence! Lanka (yarn) is treated as an uncountable mass here, so it takes the partitive case (lankaa). However, you are buying one specific, whole piece of new fabric. Because it is a complete countable object, uusi kangas goes into the total object case, which looks exactly like the genitive (uuden kankaan).
Wait, the basic word for fabric is kangas. Where does the nk in kankaan come from?