Breakdown of Olen vakuuttunut siitä, että sekä vahvuus että mielikuvitus auttavat.
olla
to be
se
it / he / she (of a person) / that
auttaa
to help
että
that (conjunction)
sekä
both
vakuuttunut
convinced
vahvuus
strength
mielikuvitus
imagination
Questions & Answers about Olen vakuuttunut siitä, että sekä vahvuus että mielikuvitus auttavat.
This lesson covers the referative construction. How would we rewrite this sentence to replace the että clause with a participle?
You would say Olen vakuuttunut sekä vahvuuden että mielikuvituksen auttavan. The placeholder siitä is dropped. Because the main clause subject (I) and the subordinate subjects (strength and imagination) are different, the subordinate subjects go into the genitive case (vahvuuden, mielikuvituksen) and no possessive suffix is added to the active present participle auttavan.
If we change the sentence to 'I am convinced that I am helping', how does the referative construction change to show that the subjects match?
It becomes Olen vakuuttunut auttavani. Because the subject 'I' is identical in both clauses, we drop the genitive pronoun entirely. Instead, we attach the first-person singular possessive suffix -ni directly to the participle, applying the coreference rule taught in this lesson.
Why is the word siitä necessary before the että clause in the original sentence?
The adjective vakuuttunut (convinced) requires its complement to be in the elative case, which ends in -sta or -stä. Because you cannot attach a case ending directly to an että clause, the pronoun se is used in the elative case (siitä) as a placeholder. It literally translates to 'convinced of it, that...'.
Why does the verb auttavat take the plural form here?
The conjunction pair sekä ... että ... (both ... and ...) links two singular subjects (vahvuus and mielikuvitus) into a compound subject. In Finnish, this type of compound subject requires the plural verb form auttavat rather than the singular auttaa.
What are the root words that make up the noun mielikuvitus?
It is a compound word formed from mieli (mind) and kuvitus (illustration). Kuvitus is derived from the noun kuva (picture) via the verb kuvittaa (to illustrate). Literally translated, imagination is an 'illustration of the mind'.
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