Breakdown of Pillinkö läpi sinä puhallat läpinäkyvää lasia?
sinä
you
lasi
glass
läpi
through
puhaltaa
to blow
Questions & Answers about Pillinkö läpi sinä puhallat läpinäkyvää lasia?
Why does the question clitic -kö attach to pillin instead of the postposition läpi?
When using contrastive focus, the clitic -ko/-kö attaches to the specific piece of information being questioned, which is moved to the front. You are asking if it is a pipe you use rather than a different tool, so the clitic goes on pillin. If you wanted to question the direction instead, you would attach it to the postposition, making it läpikö.
Does the clitic -kö interrupt the grammatical link between pillin and läpi?
No. The word läpi is a postposition meaning through, which requires its head word to be in the genitive case. The noun pilli correctly takes the genitive -n ending to become pillin. Clitics are always added to the very end of a word, after all case endings, so -kö simply tacks onto the fully formed genitive word without breaking its relationship to the postposition.
Why is läpinäkyvää lasia in the partitive case rather than the accusative?
Glass (lasi) is an uncountable mass noun here, and the action of blowing (puhaltaa) is an ongoing, unbounded process. Whenever you have an ongoing action affecting an unspecified quantity of a mass noun, the object must take the partitive case.
How is the adjective läpinäkyvä formed?