Questions & Answers about Lapsi teki pienen koiran muovista ja nahasta.
The current lesson is about the elative plural (-ista/-istä), but muovista and nahasta look like singular elative words. Why aren't they plural?
When talking about what an object is made of, materials like plastic (muovi) and leather (nahka) are uncountable mass nouns, so they stay in the singular. Even though you are practicing the plural -ista/-istä endings, it is important to remember that uncountable materials just use the singular -sta/-stä.
How does the elative case (-sta/-stä) translate to "out of"? I thought it meant "from" a place.
Its core meaning is indeed movement out from inside a place (like "out of the house"). By extension, Finnish uses this exact same concept for materials. Just like in English you can say a toy is made "out of" plastic, Finnish uses the elative (muovista) to show the origin material something was created from.
Why is the object pienen koiran instead of the basic form pieni koira?
Because the child successfully completed making one entire dog. In Finnish, a fully completed action with a whole object takes the total object form, which ends in -n (often called the genitive-accusative). If the making was still in progress and unfinished, you would use the partitive case (pientä koiraa).
The word for leather is nahka. Why does it become nahasta here instead of "nahkasta"?