Breakdown of Hän ei koskisi tuohon hyönteiseen.
tuo
that
hän
he / she
ei
no / not (en, et, ei, emme, ette, eivät)
koskea
to touch
hyönteinen
insect
Questions & Answers about Hän ei koskisi tuohon hyönteiseen.
How do we form the negative conditional ei koskisi from the verb koskea?
In negative conditional sentences, only the negative word changes to match the person (here, hän ei). The main verb uses the conditional marker -isi but takes no personal ending. You start with the verb stem koske-, and when you add -isi, the final e drops out, leaving us with koskisi.
Why is "that insect" in the illative ("into") case here (tuohon hyönteiseen)?
In Finnish, the verb koskea (to touch) requires its target to be in the illative case. While in English you just touch an object, in Finnish you grammatically touch into it. This is why you must use the illative forms instead of the partitive or accusative.
How do we get the form hyönteiseen from the dictionary word hyönteinen (insect)?
Hyönteinen belongs to a common group of words ending in -nen. To find the stem of these words, you change the -nen to -se-, giving you the stem hyönteise-. To form the illative case, you lengthen the last vowel and add -n, which results in hyönteiseen.
Why does tuo (that) change into tuohon?
In Finnish, modifiers like "this" and "that" must always match the grammatical case of the noun they describe. Because the verb forced the insect into the illative case (hyönteiseen), the word tuo also has to take its illative form, which is tuohon.
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