Breakdown of Moderni silta olisi rakennettu teräksestä.
olla
to be
rakentaa
to build
silta
bridge
moderni
modern
teräs
the steel
Questions & Answers about Moderni silta olisi rakennettu teräksestä.
How do we form the conditional perfect passive olisi rakennettu in this sentence?
It is made of two parts: the auxiliary verb olla in the conditional mood (olisi) and the passive past participle of the main verb (rakennettu). Notice that in all passive compound tenses, the auxiliary verb is always locked into the third-person singular (olisi), no matter what is being built.
Why is silta in the nominative case here? Isn't it the object being built?
Yes, the bridge is the object of the building action! In Finnish passive sentences, if the object is a complete, countable thing (like one entire bridge being built), it takes the basic nominative form rather than the accusative or partitive. It looks exactly like a subject, which neatly matches our English translation.
Why does "out of steel" use the elative case (teräksestä)?
In Finnish, the elative case (-sta or -stä) is the standard way to express the material that something is made out of or from. Since the bridge would have been made out of steel (teräs), we simply attach the elative ending to it.
Where does the -kse- in teräksestä come from if the dictionary word is teräs?
The word teräs belongs to a specific group of Finnish words ending in -s (similar to rakennus or keskus). When you need to add a case ending to these words, the final -s changes into a -kse- stem. Therefore, teräs becomes teräks- before adding the -stä ending.
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