Questions & Answers about Ovatpa he salaa yhdessä!
Why does this sentence start with the verb Ovatpa instead of the pronoun He?
When you use the emphatic clitic -pa or -pä to add a tone of surprise or realization (like "sure" or "wow"), you attach it to the word you are emphasizing and move that word to the absolute front of the clause. Here, the verb ovat is emphasized, so it jumps to the front to host the clitic.
Why do we use -pa here instead of -pä?
This is simply due to vowel harmony. The word the clitic attaches to, ovat, contains the back vowels o and a. Therefore, it must take the back-vowel version of the clitic, which is -pa.
The word salaa looks like a noun in the partitive case. Is it acting as an object here?
No, it is acting as an adverb meaning "secretly". While it historically comes from the partitive form of an old root word for "secret" (which is also where the noun salaisuus comes from), in modern Finnish salaa is a fixed adverb. It does not change its ending based on the grammar of the rest of the sentence.
I know the number one is yksi. How did it become yhdessä to mean "together"?
Yhdessä is the inessive case (the "in" case) of the number yksi. The word stem changes from yksi to yhde-, and the ending -ssä is added. Literally, it translates to "in one", which is how Finnish logically expresses the concept of being "together".
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