Breakdown of Tämä keitto maistuu suolaiselta.
tämä
this
keitto
soup
maistua
to taste (have a flavor)
suolainen
salty
Questions & Answers about Tämä keitto maistuu suolaiselta.
Why does suolainen have the -lta ending here?
This is because of the verb maistua (to taste like). In Finnish, verbs of perception (describing how things look, sound, feel, taste, or smell) require the descriptive word to be in the ablative case (-lta/-ltä).
I remember learning that "to taste" is maistaa. Why use maistua here?
Finnish uses different verbs for the action of tasting versus having a flavor. Maistaa is an active verb: someone is intentionally tasting something. Maistua means a thing "tastes like" something. With maistua, the food is the subject, and the flavor takes the -lta/-ltä ending.
How does the word suolainen (salty) change to suolaiselta?
Words ending in -nen change their ending to -se- before adding most case endings. Here, suolainen becomes the stem suolaise-, and then we add the -lta ending.
Since soup is a liquid, shouldn't keitto be in the partitive case (keittoa)?
Even though soup is an uncountable substance, we are talking about this specific bowl or batch of soup as a whole subject, so it stays in the basic nominative case (Tämä keitto). If the sentence was an action like "I am eating some soup", then you would use the partitive.