Breakdown of Etsimme noita hammastahnoja apteekista.
tuo
that
etsiä
to look for
apteekki
pharmacy
hammastahna
toothpaste
Questions & Answers about Etsimme noita hammastahnoja apteekista.
Why is it noita instead of nuo for "those"?
Noita is the partitive plural form of tuo (that). We use the partitive case here because the verb etsiä (to look for) always requires its object to be in the partitive. Since you are looking for multiple things, both the pronoun (noita) and the noun (hammastahnoja) must match in the partitive plural.
The translation says "were looking for", but doesn't etsimme mean "we are looking for"?
It can actually mean both! For verbs that end in -iä like etsiä, the present tense (etsimme) and the past tense (etsimme) look exactly the same. You have to rely on context to know if it means "we are looking for" or "we were looking for".
Why is the pharmacy in the -sta (from) form if the translation says "in the pharmacy"?
In Finnish, when you search for something in a place, you use the "out of" case (-sta). The logic is that you are searching in order to find something and take it out of that location. So apteekista literally means "out of the pharmacy", even though English uses "in".
How do we get hammastahnoja from the basic word hammastahna?
To form the partitive plural of a word ending in -a like hammastahna (toothpaste), the final -a changes to an -o before adding the plural partitive ending -ja. This gives us hammastahnoja.
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