Breakdown of Suon yli kävelleet turistit olivat väsyneitä mutta iloisia.
olla
to be
iloinen
happy
väsynyt
tired
mutta
but
kävellä
to walk
yli
past / over / across
turisti
the tourist
suo
bog
Questions & Answers about Suon yli kävelleet turistit olivat väsyneitä mutta iloisia.
Why is the action "walked" translated as kävelleet instead of a relative clause like "jotka kävelivät"?
Because it is acting as an adjective modifying turistit (tourists). This is a very common structure in Finnish. Instead of using a relative clause with jotka (who), Finnish compresses the action into the active past participle (the plural NUT-participle, kävelleet) and places it right before the noun.
Why is the location suon yli placed before the verb kävelleet?
When a participle is used like an adjective, any words tied to that action (such as locations, objects, or adverbs) must be "sandwiched" directly in front of the participle. So, the phrase literally translates to "the across-the-bog-walked tourists."
Why are the adjectives väsyneitä and iloisia in the partitive plural?
When the subject of an olla (to be) sentence is plural, the adjectives describing the subject's state are almost always in the partitive plural. Using the nominative plural (väsyneet mutta iloiset) would sound unnatural here, as it would imply you are equating the tourists to a specific, restricted group of "the tired and happy ones" rather than simply describing how they felt.
How would we rewrite the end of the sentence to say they were "both tired and happy" using the niin ... kuin ... -kin structure?
You would drop mutta and say: ...olivat niin väsyneitä kuin iloisiakin. The first adjective gets niin in front of it, and the second gets kuin before it and the -kin suffix attached to its end (iloisia + -kin).
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