Breakdown of Meillä on yksi lyhytkarvainen ja yksi pitkäkarvainen kissa.
olla
to be
kissa
cat
ja
and
me
we
yksi
one
lyhytkarvainen
short-haired
pitkäkarvainen
long-haired
Questions & Answers about Meillä on yksi lyhytkarvainen ja yksi pitkäkarvainen kissa.
How exactly are lyhytkarvainen and pitkäkarvainen built?
They are compound property adjectives. The first part is a basic adjective (lyhyt or pitkä), and the second part is the noun karva (fur or hair) combined with the -inen suffix. This pattern describes physical characteristics, perfectly matching the English '-haired' pattern.
Why don't the modifiers lyhyt and pitkä take a genitive ending here?
In these -inen compound adjectives, the first word generally stays in the basic nominative case when it is an adjective describing the noun root. That is why it is pitkäkarvainen, not pitkänkarvainen.
Could I use the suffix -hiuksinen instead of -karvainen to mean '-haired'?
Not for a cat. The word hius (plural hiukset) is strictly used for human head hair. For animal fur and human body hair, the correct word is karva. A person is pitkähiuksinen, but an animal is pitkäkarvainen.
Could I shorten this sentence using a hyphen, like lyhyt- ja pitkäkarvainen?
Yes, you can. Because the second half of the compound (-karvainen) is identical for both adjectives, you can drop it from the first word and replace it with a hyphen: yksi lyhyt- ja yksi pitkäkarvainen kissa. The original sentence repeats it for emphasis, but the hyphenated version is very natural and common.
Since the sentence talks about two cats in total, why is kissa in the singular form?
In Finnish, the noun agrees with the numeral phrase immediately attached to it. Because the final part of the list is yksi pitkäkarvainen kissa (one long-haired cat), kissa remains singular to match yksi. If you grouped the total number first, you would use the partitive: Meillä on kaksi kissaa (We have two cats).
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