Breakdown of Keitto kiehui, kunnes vihannekset olivat kypsiä.
olla
to be
keitto
soup
vihannes
vegetable
kunnes
until
kiehua
to boil
kypsä
cooked
Questions & Answers about Keitto kiehui, kunnes vihannekset olivat kypsiä.
I learned that "to boil" is keittää. Why is the verb kiehui here?
Keittää is a transitive verb, meaning someone is actively boiling something (e.g., "I boil the soup"). Kiehua is the intransitive version, meaning the liquid itself is boiling on its own (e.g., "The soup boils"). Because the soup is the subject performing the action here, we use the past tense of kiehua, which is kiehui.
Is the comma before kunnes mandatory?
Yes. In Finnish punctuation rules, a subordinate clause starting with a conjunction like kunnes (until), että (that), or koska (because) must be separated from the main clause by a comma.
Does the word kunnes change the word order of the clause that follows it?
No, it doesn't trigger any special word order changes. The clause following kunnes keeps standard sentence structure. Here you can see it perfectly follows the normal Subject-Verb-Adjective order: vihannekset (subject) + olivat (verb) + kypsiä (adjective).
Why is kypsiä (cooked) in the partitive plural instead of the nominative plural (kypsät)?
When you use the verb olla (to be) to describe a plural subject like vihannekset, the describing adjective usually has to be in the partitive plural. This tells us what kind of things the subject are. Therefore, the base word kypsä becomes the partitive plural kypsiä.
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