Questions & Answers about Me löydämme delfiinin merestä.
Why is it merestä (from the sea) rather than meressä (in the sea) when the English translation says 'in the sea'?
The verb löytää (to find) requires the elative case (-sta/-stä). In Finnish logic, you are discovering something and mentally or physically plucking it from its location. So you always find something from somewhere!
Why is the object delfiinin ending in -n instead of the partitive delfiiniä?
The verb löytää is a resultative verb. Finding something implies a successfully completed action, so it requires a total object. Here, delfiinin takes the genitive-accusative -n ending to show we successfully found a whole, specific dolphin.
If we wanted to use this lesson's connector, kuten (like/such as), to say 'We find a dolphin, like Flipper, in the sea', how would it fit into this sentence?
You would add it right after the noun it illustrates: Me löydämme delfiinin, kuten Flipperin, merestä. Notice that Flipperin takes the exact same -n object case as delfiinin. When kuten gives an example, the example word usually matches the grammatical case of the word it refers to.
Could we drop the word Me from the beginning of the sentence?
Yes, absolutely. Because the verb löydämme already has the first-person plural ending -mme, the pronoun me is optional. Keeping it just adds a mild emphasis to who is doing the finding, which is very common in everyday spoken Finnish.
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