Questions & Answers about Hän kertoo aina hyviä vitsejä.
Why is hyviä vitsejä in the partitive plural instead of the nominative or accusative plural?
The object is in the partitive plural because the quantity is indefinite. He tells an unspecified number of jokes, not all the jokes in the world. Additionally, the verb kertoa often takes a partitive object when referring to an ongoing habit rather than a single completed action.
In English we say "He always tells", but the Finnish sentence is Hän kertoo aina. Can I say Hän aina kertoo?
In neutral Finnish word order, adverbs of frequency like aina (always) usually come immediately after the verb. Putting aina before the verb is grammatically possible but shifts the focus, making it sound heavily emphatic, similar to "He does always tell..." in English.
How exactly does the base word vitsi become vitsejä in the partitive plural?
For many newer words and loanwords ending in -i (like vitsi, taksi, or pankki), the final -i changes to an -e- before the plural marker -i-. The partitive ending is -ä. Because the resulting vowel sequence -eiä is awkward to pronounce, the plural -i- turns into a consonant -j-, resulting in vitsejä.
If I wanted to say "He tells a good joke" (just one), would it still be in the partitive?
It depends on whether the action is complete. If you mean he tells one specific joke from beginning to end, the object is a total object and takes the accusative case (which looks like the genitive here): Hän kertoo hyvän vitsin. You would only use the singular partitive (Hän kertoo hyvää vitsiä) if he were currently in the middle of telling it.
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