Breakdown of Projekti valmistui kahdeksantenatoista elokuuta.
elokuu
August
valmistua
to graduate, to be completed
projekti
project
kahdeksastoista
eighteenth
Questions & Answers about Projekti valmistui kahdeksantenatoista elokuuta.
How is the word kahdeksantenatoista built? It looks really long!
This is the word for 'on the 18th'. The ordinal '18th' is kahdeksastoista. To say an event happens on a date, Finnish uses the essive case (ending in -na or -nä). For teen numbers (11-19), only the first part changes. The word kahdeksas (8th) turns into the stem kahdeksante-, and we add -na to get kahdeksantena. The -toista part just gets attached at the end without changing!
Why does the month elokuuta have the -ta ending?
When giving a date in Finnish, the month is always put in the partitive case. You can think of it as saying 'the 18th part of August'. Because elokuu ends in two vowels (-uu), its partitive ending is -ta.
The verb valmistui means 'finished'. Could I use loppui here instead?
You could, but valmistui (from the base verb valmistua) is much better here. The verb loppua just means 'to end' or 'to run out'. Valmistua specifically means 'to get ready' or 'to be completed'. Since a project is something you work on until it is done, valmistua is the most natural choice.
If I want to write this date with numbers, how do I do it?
You would write 18. elokuuta. The period after the number 18 is very important! It acts like the 'th' in English, showing that it is an ordinal number ('18th', not '18'). Even when written as a number, you still read it out loud in the essive case as kahdeksantenatoista.
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