Questions & Answers about Uni jäi lyhyeksi viime yönä.
Here jäädä means “to remain” or “to end up.”
- The third-person singular past tense of jäädä is irregular: it becomes jäi, not jääi or jääti.
- In many Finnish verbs you drop -da/-dä and add -i, but stems can change: jäädä → stem jä-
- -i = jäi. You simply have to memorize this irregular form.
After verbs of resulting state like jäädä, the complement takes the translative case -ksi to express “becoming” or “ending up” in that state.
- lyhyt (“short”) + -ksi → lyhyeksi (“into/for short”).
Viime yönä breaks down as:
• yö “night” → genitive yön
• add the essive ending -ä → yönä, meaning “as the night” or “during the night (on that night)”
• viime “last” modifies it.
So viime yönä literally means “on the last night,” i.e. “last night.”
• yöllä (adessive -llä) means “during the night” in a general sense, without specifying which night.
• yönä (essive of the genitive) is used with determiners or modifiers—tänä yönä (“tonight”), viime yönä (“last night”), ensi yönä (“next night”)—to single out a particular night.
Yes. Finnish allows:
• Minulla uni jäi lyhyeksi viime yönä. (“I ended up with too little sleep last night.”) using minulla in the adessive to mark the experiencer.
• Uneni jäi lyhyeksi viime yönä. (“My sleep ended up short last night.”) using the possessive suffix -ni on uni.
Often, however, the possessor is omitted if it’s clear from context.