Sateinen päivä sai minut pysymään kotona kuuman teen kanssa.

The rainy day made me stay at home with hot tea.

Breakdown of Sateinen päivä sai minut pysymään kotona kuuman teen kanssa.

• kotona: at home
• kuuma: hot
• kanssa: with
• päivä: the day
• sateinen: rainy
• saada: to make
• minut: me
• pysyä: to stay
• tee: the tea

Questions & Answers about Sateinen päivä sai minut pysymään kotona kuuman teen kanssa.

What is the overall grammatical structure of the sentence “Sateinen päivä sai minut pysymään kotona kuuman teen kanssa”?

The sentence uses a causative construction. The subject Sateinen päivä (“rainy day”) is causing an effect, expressed by the verb sai (the past form of “saada,” meaning “to cause” or “make”). Following sai, there’s an object in the accusative form (minut) plus an infinitive (pysymään), which together indicate what action was caused. The sentence is rounded out by the adverbial phrase kotona (“at home”) and the descriptive phrase kuuman teen kanssa (“with a hot tea”), which together complete the context.

Why is the pronoun rendered as minut instead of using the nominative form minä?

In Finnish, when a causative verb like sai is used, the person who is affected by the action is placed in the accusative case. Minut is the accusative form of minä (“I/me”), indicating that the action (being caused to stay) is performed on or by the person.

Why is the verb pysymään in the infinitive form instead of being conjugated?

After causative verbs such as saada, Finnish uses an infinitive to express the action that the subject is caused to perform. Here, pysymään is the second infinitive form of pysyä (“to stay”), and it directly follows the object in the construction. This pattern tells us that the rainy day made “me” stay at home.

How is the phrase kuuman teen kanssa structured, and why is teen in the genitive form?

The phrase splits into three parts: kuuman (the adjective “hot”), teen (the noun “tea”), and kanssa (“with”). In this construction, tee appears in the genitive singular as teen—a common pattern when using expressions of accompaniment with kanssa. The adjective kuuman agrees with the noun’s case, ensuring that the descriptive quality (“hot”) properly modifies “tea.”

What role does the adverb kotona play in the sentence?

Kotona means “at home” and functions as an adverbial phrase specifying the location of the action. It tells us where the effect of the causative construction occurs—that is, the rain made “me” stay at home.

How does the flexible word order in Finnish, as seen in this sentence, differ from English word order?

Finnish relies heavily on case endings and verb constructions to indicate grammatical relationships, which makes its word order more flexible than English. While an English sentence typically adheres to a strict subject–verb–object order (e.g., “A rainy day made me stay at home with a hot tea”), the Finnish sentence uses markers like the accusative (minut) and genitive (teen) to clearly show the roles of each word. This means that, even with variations in word order, the meaning remains clear in Finnish due to these morphological cues.