Breakdown of Me mentiin mökille ja grillattiin makkaraa.
ja
and
me
we
mennä
to go
mökki
the cottage
makkara
sausage
grillata
to grill
Questions & Answers about Me mentiin mökille ja grillattiin makkaraa.
Why are "mentiin" and "grillattiin" used here instead of "menimme" and "grillasimme"?
In spoken Finnish (puhekieli), the passive form is almost always used for the first-person plural. Mentiin is the past passive of mennä, and grillattiin is the past passive of grillata. Even though they are grammatically passive, when used with the word me, they simply mean "we went" and "we grilled".
In standard Finnish we often drop the pronoun "me". Can we drop it here and just say "mentiin mökille"?
When using the passive form to mean "we" in spoken Finnish, you generally need to keep the pronoun me. If you drop it and just say Mentiin mökille, it sounds like a true passive meaning "Someone went to the cottage" or "People went to the cottage". Keeping me makes it completely clear that you specifically mean "we".
How do we build the past passive form "grillattiin" from the verb "grillata"?
Why do we say "mökille" instead of "mökkiin" when going into a cottage?
In Finnish, certain locations conventionally take the outer location cases (like -lle, -llä, -ltä) instead of the inner ones (-iin, -ssä, -stä). Mökki (cottage) is one of these traditional exceptions. You go mökille (to the cottage) and spend time mökillä (at the cottage).
Why is "makkaraa" in the partitive case here?
Makkara is in the partitive case (makkaraa) because the action of grilling is being treated as an ongoing, open-ended process, or because they are grilling an unspecified amount of sausage (a mass noun) rather than one specific, whole sausage.
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