Breakdown of Ohennatko sinä minun hiuksiani saksilla?
sinä
you
minun
my, mine
sakset
scissors
hius
the hair (single strand)
ohentaa
to thin out
Questions & Answers about Ohennatko sinä minun hiuksiani saksilla?
How is the verb ohentaa derived, and what is its root adjective?
It is derived from the adjective ohut (thin). To create a verb that means 'to make something [adjective]', we use the suffix -ntaa / -ntää. First, we take the inflectional stem of ohut, which is ohen-. Adding the suffix gives us the transitive verb ohentaa (to thin something out).
Why is hiuksiani in the partitive case here instead of the accusative?
Hair on a head is treated as a plural noun in Finnish (hiukset). When the verb ohentaa is used with a plural mass like hair, the action doesn't logically 'finish' or consume the entire object in a bounded way. Because the action affects an indefinite amount of the hair, we use the partitive plural form hiuksia (which then gets the possessive suffix -ni appended to it).
Could I drop the word minun and just say Ohennatko sinä hiuksiani saksilla?
Yes, absolutely. In standard Finnish, first- and second-person genitive pronouns (minun, sinun, meidän, teidän) are optional if the noun has the correct possessive suffix attached. Since hiuksiani already contains the first-person singular suffix -ni, the word minun can be safely dropped.
Why is 'with scissors' translated as saksilla without using a separate word for 'with'?
In Finnish, you express the tool or instrument used to perform an action by putting that noun into the adessive case (the -lla / -llä ending). The word for scissors (sakset) is a plural word, so to say 'by means of scissors' or 'with scissors', you use its adessive plural form, saksilla.
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