Breakdown of Olen ostanut lankaa ja uuden kankaan.
olla
to be
ja
and
uusi
new
ostaa
to buy
lanka
yarn
kangas
fabric
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?
Kangas belongs to a special group of nouns ending in -as or -äs. When forming the stem for these words, the final -s drops, the vowel before it is doubled, and the word undergoes reverse consonant gradation (the consonants get stronger instead of weaker). The weak ng sound in kangas strengthens to nk, giving us the stem kankaa-. Finally, we add the genitive ending -n.
Why does the word for 'new' change to uuden instead of staying as uusi?
In Finnish, adjectives must always match the case of the noun they describe. Because the noun is in the genitive-accusative case (kankaan), the adjective describing it must also be in the genitive case. The genitive stem of uusi is uude-, and adding the -n ending gives us uuden kankaan.
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