Questions & Answers about Kenen vuoro on maksaa kahvi?
Why is kahvi in the basic nominative form here, rather than kahvin or kahvia?
When a sentence lacks a standard active subject (like "I" or "you") in its main clause, the total object of its infinitive verb appears in the nominative form instead of the genitive. Because "It is someone's turn" doesn't have an active subject doing the main verb, the object of maksaa is the basic nominative kahvi (meaning the whole coffee), not kahvin. If you were paying for an undefined amount of coffee, it would still take the partitive case as kahvia.
In English we pay "for" the coffee. Why is there no word for "for" in the Finnish sentence?
The verb maksaa (to pay) can take the thing being bought as a direct object, so you literally say "to pay the coffee". Alternatively, you can use the elative case ending -sta/-stä to mean "for", making it maksaa kahvista, which is also completely correct and very common.
Since this lesson is about the -ittain/-ittäin suffix, how could I say "to pay for the coffee cup by cup"?
You can add the distributive suffix to the plural stem of kuppi (cup). The plural stem is kupei-, so adding -ttain gives you kupeittain (cup by cup / by the cup). You could say: Kenen vuoro on maksaa kahvit kupeittain?
Why is the question word kenen used here instead of kuka?
Kenen is the genitive (possessive) form of kuka (who). Just like in English where we use "whose" to show possession, Finnish uses the genitive case to say "who's turn" or "the turn of who".
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