Breakdown of Miksi jotkut ihmiset ikääntyvät yhä nopeammin?
nopeasti
fast
miksi
why
ihminen
human
joku
somebody, someone
Questions & Answers about Miksi jotkut ihmiset ikääntyvät yhä nopeammin?
How does yhä work in this sentence to mean "faster and faster"?
When paired with a comparative, the word yhä indicates a continuous, ongoing change. While English repeats the comparative phrase ("faster and faster" or "more and more"), Finnish simply puts yhä before a single comparative word. Here, it modifies the comparative adverb nopeammin.
Why is the comparative nopeammin used here instead of nopeampi?
Nopeammin is a comparative adverb (formed from nopeasti), and it modifies the verb ikääntyvät to describe how the action happens. If you used the comparative adjective nopeampi, it would describe the nouns (the people themselves) rather than the action of aging.
What kind of verb is ikääntyvät?
The infinitive is ikääntyä. It is created by taking the noun ikä (age) and adding the suffix -ntyä, which forms intransitive verbs describing a gradual change of state or transforming into something. It translates perfectly to the English verb "to age".
Why is it jotkut ihmiset instead of muutamat ihmiset?
Jotkut (the plural of the indefinite pronoun joku) refers to an unspecified subset of a larger group, which perfectly fits the general "some people" meaning here. Muutamat is also used for "some" but usually implies a smaller, slightly more defined handful, closer in meaning to "a few".