Breakdown of Tämä funktio on mahdoton ymmärtää ilman muuttujaa.
tämä
this
olla
to be
ymmärtää
to understand
ilman
without
mahdoton
impossible
funktio
function
muuttuja
variable
Questions & Answers about Tämä funktio on mahdoton ymmärtää ilman muuttujaa.
Why is mahdoton in the nominative case here instead of the partitive mahdotonta?
Because the thing being evaluated (tämä funktio) is placed at the front as the subject, so the adjective mahdoton agrees with it in the nominative. If you instead used the impersonal "It is..." structure, the adjective would take the partitive: On mahdotonta ymmärtää tämä funktio.
Can I use this exact same sentence structure with other adjectives, like "easy" or "hard"?
Yes! This is a very common pattern in Finnish: [Subject] on [Adjective] [1st Infinitive]. For example, you can say Tämä funktio on helppo ymmärtää (This function is easy to understand) or Tämä funktio on vaikea ymmärtää (This function is hard to understand).
Why is the word for variable (muuttuja) in the partitive case (muuttujaa)?
The word ilman (without) acts as a preposition here, and it always requires the noun following it to be in the partitive case.
I know that mahdollinen means "possible". How is mahdoton related to it?
The suffix -ton (or -tön) means "without" or "-less". In Finnish, adding it to a stem is a standard way to create the negative or opposite form of an adjective. Here, it turns the root for "possible" into "impossible".
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