Word
Sinun täytyy varoa jalankulkijoita.
Meaning
You must watch out for pedestrians.
Part of speech
sentence
Pronunciation
Course
Lesson
Breakdown of Sinun täytyy varoa jalankulkijoita.
sinä
you
täytyä
to have to
varoa
to beware
jalankulkija
pedestrian
Questions & Answers about Sinun täytyy varoa jalankulkijoita.
Why does the sentence start with sinun (your) instead of sinä (you)?
The verb täytyy (must / have to) uses a special necessive sentence structure. It always requires its subject to be in the genitive case (ending in -n). You can think of the literal translation as "of you it is required".
Why is the object jalankulkijoita in the partitive case here?
The verb varoa (to watch out for / to beware of) is a partitive verb. This means it always forces its object into the partitive case, because the action of "watching out" is seen as continuous and without a clear, finished endpoint.
How do we build the partitive plural jalankulkijoita from the basic word?
The base word is jalankulkija (pedestrian). To make it partitive plural, we need the plural marker -i- and the partitive ending -ta. When a word ends in -ija, the final -a changes into an -o- before the plural -i-, which gives us jalankulkijoita.
What are the individual parts of the long compound word jalankulkija?
It is made up of jalan (by foot) and kulkija (traveler or person who goes). So, a pedestrian in Finnish is quite literally a "foot-traveler".