Breakdown of Tuon muotokuvan maalasi nainen, joka juo usein viiniä.
tuo
that
nainen
woman
usein
often
viini
wine
juoda
to drink
joka
who / which (relative pronoun)
maalata
to paint
muotokuva
portrait
Questions & Answers about Tuon muotokuvan maalasi nainen, joka juo usein viiniä.
Why isn't a passive verb used here to say "was painted by"?
In English, we use the passive voice to emphasize the portrait by putting it first. In Finnish, you emphasize the portrait simply by moving it to the front of the sentence using Object-Verb-Subject (OVS) word order. Because Finnish passive verbs don't easily allow you to say who did the action, OVS is the standard way to translate this "was done by" structure.
With the object first, how do we know the woman painted the portrait and not the other way around?
The case endings tell us who is doing what! nainen is in the nominative (basic) case, marking it as the subject (the doer). tuon muotokuvan ends in -n, which is the accusative/genitive ending used for a total object. Even though the object comes first, the grammar makes the roles crystal clear.
Why are the two objects in this sentence (muotokuvan and viiniä) in different cases?
It depends on whether the action is complete and the item is countable. tuon muotokuvan (that portrait) is a single, countable thing that was completely finished, so it takes the total object -n ending. viiniä (wine) is an uncountable mass noun and the drinking is an ongoing habit, so it requires the partitive case.
Why use joka for "who" instead of kuka?
kuka is strictly a question word used to ask "who?". When you are connecting a descriptive clause back to a noun—like saying "a woman who drinks"—you must use the relative pronoun joka.
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