Breakdown of Se ois kyl tavallaan vahinko.
olla
to be
se
it / he / she (of a person) / that
vahinko
accident
kyllä
definitely (emphasis)
tavallaan
in a way
Questions & Answers about Se ois kyl tavallaan vahinko.
What standard Finnish word does ois come from?
It is the common spoken version of olisi, which is the conditional form ("would be") of the verb olla. In colloquial Finnish, it is very typical to drop the middle vowel from conditional verb endings, turning -isi into -is.
How does kyl function in this sentence?
Kyl is the shortened spoken version of kyllä. While you likely first learned kyllä as the word for "yes", when used in the middle of a sentence like this, it acts as an emphasizing adverb meaning "definitely", "indeed", or "surely".
How exactly does tavallaan translate to "kind of"?
It is built from the noun tapa (way, habit, or custom). It combines the adessive case (tavalla, meaning "in a way") with the third-person possessive suffix -an ("its"). Literally meaning "in its way", it is a very common adverb used to say "kind of" or "in a way".
Why isn't vahinko in the partitive case here?
This is a basic "A is B" sentence (subject + olla + noun). In Finnish, when you describe what something is, the noun stays in the basic nominative case if it represents a complete, countable thing. Because an accident is a single, complete event, vahinko stays in its dictionary form.
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