Breakdown of Kymmenennes maakunnan väestöstä muutti pois viime vuonna.
vuosi
year
pois
away
viime
last (viime vuonna)
väestö
population
muuttaa
to move (relocate)
kymmenennes
tenth (fraction)
maakunta
region
Questions & Answers about Kymmenennes maakunnan väestöstä muutti pois viime vuonna.
How is the fraction kymmenennes (a tenth) formed?
To make a formal fraction, you take the genitive stem of the number and add the suffix -nes. For the number 10 (kymmenen), the stem is kymmenen-, so adding -nes gives us kymmenennes. Be careful not to confuse this fraction with the ordinal number kymmenes (tenth, as in 10th place).
Why is väestöstä (population) in the elative (-stä) case instead of the partitive or genitive?
When you want to express a fraction of a whole, Finnish uses the elative case to mean 'out of'. So kymmenennes ... väestöstä literally means 'a tenth out of the population'. This is a strict rule when using fraction words ending in -nes.
Since 'a tenth of the population' represents many people, why is the verb muutti in the singular?
In Finnish, the grammatical subject of the sentence is the fraction word itself, kymmenennes, which is a singular noun here. Therefore, the verb must be in the third-person singular (muutti), regardless of how many individual people the fraction actually represents.
Why does viime vuonna (last year) use the essive (-na/-nä) case?
As a quick refresher, time expressions that answer the question 'when?' routinely use the essive case. This is standard for saying 'in a given year' or 'on a given day', so vuosi (year) becomes vuonna.
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