Breakdown of Olipa se yllättävä huhu!
olla
to be
se
it / he / she (of a person) / that
yllättävä
surprising
huhu
the rumor
Questions & Answers about Olipa se yllättävä huhu!
Why does the sentence start with Olipa instead of Se oli?
In exclamations like this, the word you want to emphasize gets the clitic -pa (or -pä) and is moved to the very beginning of the clause. The speaker is emphasizing the verb oli (was), so it becomes Olipa to mean "It sure was..." and takes the first position.
Why does this word take -pa instead of -pä?
This is a good reminder of vowel harmony! The verb oli contains the back vowel o (while i is neutral). Because the word has a back vowel, it must take the back-vowel version of the clitic, which is -pa.
What form is the word yllättävä?
It is the present active participle of the verb yllättää (to surprise). Participles ending in -va or -vä are very commonly used as regular adjectives, directly translating to English adjectives ending in "-ing", like "surprising" in this sentence.
Why is huhu in the nominative case instead of the partitive?
Even though this is an exclamation, the underlying grammar is a basic "A is B" sentence (Se oli huhu). Because huhu (rumor) is a singular, countable noun acting as the subject complement of the verb olla, it stays in the nominative case.
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