Questions & Answers about Maan väestö on suuri.
How is the word väestö formed using the collective suffix?
It is built from the word väki, which means people or a crowd. When we add the collective suffix -sto or -stö, it creates a word for a group or system of those things. The stem of väki is väe-, so adding the suffix gives us väestö (population).
Why does this word use -stö instead of -sto?
This is due to vowel harmony. Because the root word väki (and its stem väe-) contains the front vowels ä and e, the suffix must also use the front vowel ö. If the root word had back vowels like a, o, or u, you would use -sto, such as turning kirja (book) into kirjasto (library).
Maa can mean country, earth, or ground. How do we know which one it is here?
Context is key here. Because väestö means human population, "the ground's population" wouldn't make sense. It could technically mean "the Earth's population," but when referring to the planet Earth, Maa is usually capitalized. Here it simply means "the country's".
Why is the adjective suuri in the nominative case and not the partitive?
Even though väestö refers to a large group of people, it is grammatically a singular, whole noun. In a basic "A is B" sentence like this, the adjective describing a whole subject takes the basic nominative form (suuri) rather than the partitive (suurta).
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