Questions & Answers about Tämä vanha maatila on kaunis.
The current lesson is about the partitive plural. Why are all the words here in the basic nominative case?
Because this is a simple descriptive sentence about one specific, countable thing. When saying that something is something else, the subject (tämä vanha maatila) and the describing adjective (kaunis) stay in the basic nominative form.
How would we change the words in this sentence to the partitive plural we are currently learning?
If you were saying something like 'I love these old farms', you would use the partitive plural: näitä vanhoja maatiloja. Notice that maatila becomes maatiloja. The consonants in tila do not undergo consonant gradation, so the core of the word stays the same when you add the plural j and partitive a.
Is maatila a compound word?
Yes! It is made up of maa (which means earth, land, or country) and tila (which means space, room, or estate). Put them together, and you get an agricultural estate or farm.
If we needed to put kaunis into the partitive plural, how would it change?
While it does not have consonant gradation, words ending in -is have a special stem change that you might remember from earlier lessons. The stem becomes kaunii-, and to make it partitive plural, you add -ta, resulting in kauniita.
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