Questions & Answers about Kesästä alkaen asumme maalla.
The lesson is about lähtien and pitäen, but this sentence uses alkaen. Are they interchangeable?
Yes, in this context. Alkaen, lähtien, and pitäen all act as postpositions meaning 'starting from' or 'as of,' and all of them require the preceding noun to be in the elative case (-sta/-stä). You could easily say kesästä lähtien here with no change in meaning.
Why is 'in the countryside' translated using the adessive case (maalla) instead of the inessive case (maassa)?
The word maa has multiple meanings. When used in the adessive case (maalla), it specifically forms the idiomatic phrase 'in the countryside.' If you said maassa, it would literally mean 'in the dirt' or 'in the country' (as in a nation, like Finland).
Since Finnish doesn't have a future tense, does asumme here mean we already live there, or that we will live there?
It can mean either, depending on when the sentence is spoken. If it is currently spring, asumme functions as the future tense ('we will live'). If it is currently autumn, it describes an ongoing state that began in the past ('we have been living' or 'we live').
Can I change the word order to put alkaen at the end of the sentence, like: Asumme maalla kesästä alkaen?
Yes, that word order is completely natural. Moving kesästä alkaen to the front of the sentence just places a bit more emphasis on the timing ('It is as of summer that we live in the countryside').
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