Breakdown of Tämä epävirallinen raportti on epäselvä ja epäluotettava.
tämä
this
olla
to be
ja
and
raportti
report (document, structured account)
Questions & Answers about Tämä epävirallinen raportti on epäselvä ja epäluotettava.
This sentence has three adjectives starting with epä-. How exactly does this prefix work here?
The prefix epä- is the Finnish equivalent of the English prefixes un-, in-, or non-. It attaches directly to the front of adjectives and some nouns to create their opposite meaning. Here, it turns virallinen (official), selvä (clear), and luotettava (reliable) into their negative forms.
What is the root of the word epäluotettava?
The base is the verb luottaa, meaning to trust. When you add the passive participle ending -ttava, it becomes luotettava (reliable, or literally able to be trusted). Adding the epä- prefix then makes it unreliable.
Why are the adjectives epäselvä and epäluotettava in the nominative case rather than the partitive?
They are describing raportti (report), which is a countable, singular noun. If the subject were an uncountable mass noun like vesi (water), these describing adjectives would need to be in the partitive case, like epäselvää.
Does adding the epä- prefix change the vowel harmony of the root word?
No, epä- behaves like the first part of a compound word. The vowel harmony of any suffixes added to the end of the word is still determined by the root word itself. For instance, epäluotettava ends in -va rather than -vä because the root luottaa contains back vowels.