Breakdown of Onko jossakin muussa merkissä parempi vaihteisto?
olla
to be
muu
other, else
jokin
something
parempi
better
merkki
brand
vaihteisto
gearbox
Questions & Answers about Onko jossakin muussa merkissä parempi vaihteisto?
Why is muussa used here instead of toisessa?
Muu means "other" in the sense of a completely different kind or an alternative category. Toinen usually means "another" (one more of the exact same kind) or "the other" (out of a specific pair). Since the speaker is asking about a completely different car brand, muu is the natural choice.
Why is jossakin muussa merkissä in the inessive (-ssa/-ssä, "in") case instead of the adessive (-lla/-llä, "on") normally used for "having" something?
While people and living things "have" things using the adessive case (like minulla on = I have), inanimate objects often use the inessive case if the possessed feature is physically built inside them or is a structural characteristic. A gearbox is a component inside a car, so Finnish literally says "Is in some other make a better gearbox?". Notice how the pronouns jokin and muu must both take the same case ending to agree with the noun merkki.
Doesn't jossakin usually mean "somewhere"?
Yes, it frequently translates to "somewhere", but strictly speaking, it is the inessive form of the pronoun jokin (some/something). When used on its own, it means "in some (place)", hence "somewhere". But here it is acting as an adjective describing a noun (merkissä), so it just translates as "in some".
Since this is a question about having something, why isn't vaihteisto in the partitive case?
In Finnish "have" structures, the thing being possessed stays in the basic nominative case if it is a single, whole, countable object (like one gearbox), even in questions. You would only use the partitive if the sentence was negative (e.g., "doesn't have a gearbox") or if the noun was an uncountable mass word like "money" or "coffee".
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