Breakdown of Meidän kaikkien täytyy pukea turvaliivi.
me
we
täytyä
to have to
kaikki
all, everything, everyone
pukea
to put on
Questions & Answers about Meidän kaikkien täytyy pukea turvaliivi.
Why do both meidän and kaikkien take the genitive ending here?
In Finnish, when you combine a personal pronoun with a quantifier like kaikki (all) or molemmat (both), they must agree in case. Because the necessity verb täytyy requires a genitive subject, both me and kaikki are inflected into the genitive to form the phrase meidän kaikkien (all of us).
Could I flip the word order and say kaikkien meidän täytyy?
Yes, both word orders are grammatically correct and mean the same thing. However, meidän kaikkien is the much more common and natural-sounding order in everyday Finnish.
Since the subject is 'we', why doesn't täytyy get a personal ending?
Täytyy is a necessity verb, which means it never takes personal endings. It is always frozen in the third-person singular form. The person who 'must' do something is shown entirely by the genitive subject (meidän kaikkien), so the verb itself doesn't change.
Why is turvaliivi in the basic nominative form instead of the accusative turvaliivin?
Normally, a singular total object takes the genitive-like accusative ending (for example, ostan turvaliivin). However, in sentences driven by a necessity verb like täytyy, the total object always takes the nominative form. Because this is a 'must' sentence, the object remains turvaliivi.