Word
Mä oon kadottanu mun kännykän.
Meaning
I have lost my cellphone.
Part of speech
sentence
Pronunciation
Course
Breakdown of Mä oon kadottanu mun kännykän.
olla
to be
minä
I
kadottaa
to lose (misplace an object)
kännykkä
the cellphone
Questions & Answers about Mä oon kadottanu mun kännykän.
Why does the verb end in -nu instead of -nut?
In spoken Finnish (puhekieli), it is very common to drop the final -t from past participle verbs. The standard written form kadottanut simply becomes kadottanu here. You will hear this constantly in the perfect and pluperfect tenses.
What is the standard written version (kirjakieli) of this sentence?
It would be Minä olen kadottanut minun kännykkäni (or simply Olen kadottanut kännykkäni). The spoken version we see here uses the shortened pronouns mä and mun, and the shortened verb oon.
I learned that hävitä means to lose. Why use kadottaa here?
Finnish uses different words for losing depending on the context. You use kadottaa when you misplace a physical object like a phone or keys. You use hävitä when you lose a game or competition, or when something vanishes completely.
Why does kännykkä take the -n ending to become kännykän?
The phone is the total object of the sentence. Because the action of losing it is complete, the object takes the genitive-accusative ending -n. This ending also closes the final syllable, triggering consonant gradation that weakens the double kk to a single k.