Breakdown of Kaukosäädin lienee hukassa, jos sitä ei ole sohvalla.
olla
to be
se
it / he / she (of a person) / that
ei
no / not (negative verb)
sohva
sofa
Questions & Answers about Kaukosäädin lienee hukassa, jos sitä ei ole sohvalla.
What exactly is lienee and why doesn't it look like olla?
lienee is the 3rd person singular potential mood of olla (to be), used here to express that the remote control is probably somewhere. It is highly irregular because the potential mood of olla uses the special stem lie- rather than its standard stem.
Why is the word for lost, hukassa, in the inessive case?
In Finnish, being lost is expressed as a location or state of being. The base noun hukka means loss, so hukassa literally translates to being in loss.
Why do we use the partitive sitä instead of the nominative se in the second half of the sentence?
The phrase sitä ei ole sohvalla is a negative existential clause. When you state that something does not exist or is not present in a specific location, the subject of that negative clause must take the partitive case.
How is the compound word kaukosäädin constructed?
It combines kauko- (meaning remote or long-distance) and säädin (a controller or regulator). The noun säädin is derived from the verb säätää, which means to adjust or to regulate.