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Questions & Answers about Kahvinkeitin on pesty.
Why does the Finnish sentence only use on when the English translation says "has been"?
In Finnish, the perfect passive is formed simply with the auxiliary verb on (is) and the passive past participle of the main verb, which is pesty here. You do not need separate words for "has" and "been". The structure literally looks like "is washed", but because it is the perfect tense, it means the action "has been" completed.
How is the form pesty created from the basic verb pestä (to wash)?
Pestä is a type 3 verb. To make the passive past participle, you take the consonant stem pes-, add the passive marker -t-, and then the ending -y. It gets a -y instead of a -u because of vowel harmony rules, as the vowels in pestä are front vowels.
If the coffee maker is the object of the washing, why is kahvinkeitin in the basic nominative case?
In passive sentences, a total object (where the entire thing is acted upon) is put in the nominative case instead of the genitive-accusative. If the action were incomplete or ongoing, we would use the partitive case (kahvinkeitintä). Because the whole coffee maker has been washed completely, it appears in the nominative kahvinkeitin.
What are the parts of the compound word kahvinkeitin?