Breakdown of Muinainen aarre ja kuninkaan luut oli varastettu.
olla
to be
ja
and
kuningas
king
varastaa
to steal
muinainen
ancient
aarre
the treasure
luu
the bone
Questions & Answers about Muinainen aarre ja kuninkaan luut oli varastettu.
Why is the verb oli varastettu singular, even though multiple things (the treasure and the bones) were stolen?
In Finnish, passive sentences do not have a grammatical subject, so the auxiliary verb olla always stays in the third-person singular form, which is oli. Even though the English translation has a plural subject, standard Finnish passive verbs never change to match the number of the things being acted upon.
How exactly is the pluperfect passive formed here?
It uses the third-person singular past tense of the verb to be, which is oli, plus the passive past participle of the main verb, varastettu. Together, they create the meaning 'had been stolen', showing an action completed by an unspecified person before another event in the past.
Why are aarre and luut in their basic nominative forms instead of the partitive case?
In a passive sentence, the object (the thing the action is done to) takes the nominative case when the action affects the entire object. Because the thieves took the whole treasure and all the bones, we use the basic nominative forms aarre and luut.
Why does the word for king, kuningas, change to kuninkaan in this sentence?
Kuninkaan is the genitive (possessive) case, meaning 'the king's'. When a word ends in -as, the stem usually changes to end in -aa- before adding the genitive -n. This word also undergoes reverse consonant gradation where the ng hardens to nk, resulting in kuninkaan.
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