Breakdown of Mies on olevinaan kiireinen, vaikka hänellä on loma.
olla
to be
hän
he / she
mies
man
loma
vacation
vaikka
although / even though
kiireinen
busy
Questions & Answers about Mies on olevinaan kiireinen, vaikka hänellä on loma.
How exactly does olevinaan translate to pretending to be?
It uses the quasi-construction, which pairs the conjugated verb olla (here on) with a special form of the action being pretended. Since he is pretending to be, we take the present active participle of olla, put it in the plural illative, and add the third-person possessive suffix -naan, giving us olevinaan.
If the subject were I (minä), would olevinaan stay the same?
No, the ending must match the subject because the quasi-construction requires a possessive suffix. For minä, you would use the first-person singular suffix -ni, making the phrase olen olevinani kiireinen. For we (me), it would be olemme olevinamme.
Why is kiireinen in the nominative case?
In this construction, the adjective describes the subject (mies). Since the subject is in the nominative case, the adjective complement describing what he pretends to be also stays in the nominative case, exactly as it would in the simple sentence mies on kiireinen.
As a quick refresher, why is loma in the nominative case and not the partitive in the phrase hänellä on loma?
In the Finnish ownership construction (hänellä on), the possessed object is put in the nominative case if it is a whole, countable thing. Since loma is a complete, singular concept here, it takes the nominative. If he had something uncountable, like time, it would be partitive: hänellä on aikaa.
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