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Questions & Answers about Lintu lentää ylös.
Is lentää here the basic dictionary form or a conjugated verb?
It is conjugated for "it flies", but it happens to look exactly the same as the dictionary form! To make the "he/she/it" form for this type of verb, you take the stem (lentä-) and double the last vowel, giving us lentää.
Why do we use ylös for "up" here instead of ylhäällä?
Finnish uses different words for direction and location. Because the bird is actively moving upwards, we use the directional word ylös. If the bird was already resting high up in a tree, we would use the static location word ylhäällä.
Why isn't there a word for "The" in this sentence?
Finnish does not use articles like "a" or "the". The single word lintu can translate to "bird", "a bird", or "the bird". You can usually tell which one makes sense from the context.
Why does lentää use the letter ä instead of a?
This is because of a rule called vowel harmony. In Finnish, you generally cannot mix back vowels (a, o, u) with front vowels (ä, ö, y) in the same word. Since the first vowel is e, which plays nicely with front vowels, the rest of the word must use ä.