Questions & Answers about Miksi luet tästä blogista?
Why does this sentence use the elative case (-sta/-stä) instead of the partitive case?
If the sentence used the partitive (Miksi luet tätä blogia?), it would mean "Why are you reading this blog?". Using the elative case (Miksi luet tästä blogista?) changes the meaning from reading a specific text to reading about a topic.
How does the elative case translate to "about"? I thought it meant "out of".
Its physical, spatial meaning is indeed "out of" or "from". However, when paired with "cognitive" verbs—verbs involving thinking, communicating, or gathering information like lukea (to read), kertoa (to tell), or ajatella (to think)—the elative case translates to "about". You can imagine it as pulling information out of a subject.
Why is the word for "this" written as tästä instead of tämä?
In Finnish, modifiers like demonstrative pronouns (tämä, tuo) must match the case of the noun they describe. Because the noun is in the elative case (blogista), the pronoun must also take the elative ending, transforming tämä into tästä.