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Sitä ei tehty kahdentenakymmenentenäneljäntenä huhtikuuta.

Sitä ei tehty kahdentenakymmenentenäneljäntenä huhtikuuta.
It was not done on the twenty-fourth of April.
From Lesson 142:Dates from the 11th to the 31st·Finnish

Questions & Answers about Sitä ei tehty kahdentenakymmenentenäneljäntenä huhtikuuta.

Why is the word for "on the twenty-fourth" so long, and how is it built?
Kahdentenakymmenentenäneljäntenä is the essive case form of kahdeskymmenesneljäs (twenty-fourth). To say "on a specific date", Finnish uses the essive case (the -na or -nä ending). The tricky part is that in a compound number, every single part must take this ending: kahdentena (on the second) + kymmenentenä (on the tenth) + neljäntenä (on the fourth).
Why does the sentence use sitä instead of se for "it"?
Because the sentence is negative (ei tehty). In Finnish, the object of a negative sentence is always put into the partitive case. Therefore, the basic form se becomes the partitive sitä.
Why is the verb form ei tehty instead of ei tehnyt?
This is the negative past passive. The sentence means "It was not done" (by someone generally), not "It did not do". To make a negative past passive, you take the affirmative past passive (tehtiin, meaning "was done") and drop the -in ending to get ei tehty.
Why is the month huhtikuuta in the partitive case?
When expressing dates in Finnish, the month is always in the partitive case. You can think of the partitive here as acting like the English word "of", meaning "on the twenty-fourth of April".

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