Breakdown of Kun muutin tähän kaupunkiin, yliopisto oli jo avannut uuden kirjaston.
Questions & Answers about Kun muutin tähän kaupunkiin, yliopisto oli jo avannut uuden kirjaston.
In Finnish, the personal ending on the verb shows the subject, so the pronoun is often left out.
- muutin = stem muutti-
- ending -n (1st person singular, past tense)
- The ending -n tells us the subject is “I”.
So:
- (Minä) muutin = I moved
The minä is optional unless you want to emphasize I in contrast to someone else.
Yes, you can say:
- Kun minä muutin tähän kaupunkiin, yliopisto oli jo avannut uuden kirjaston.
The meaning is basically the same. The difference is nuance:
- Kun muutin… – neutral, typical everyday style.
- Kun minä muutin… – puts a bit more emphasis on I (for contrast, e.g. “when I moved (not someone else)”).
Grammatically, both are correct.
This is about movement vs. location.
- tähän kaupunkiin = into this city (movement towards a place)
- tähän – illative of tämä (“this”), “to/into this”
- kaupunkiin – illative of kaupunki (“city”), “into the city”
- tässä kaupungissa = in this city (static location)
- tässä – “in this (place)”
- kaupungissa – “in the city”
The verb muuttaa here is about going to live somewhere, i.e. a change of location. Therefore Finnish uses the illative (movement into): tähän kaupunkiin, not the inessive: tässä kaupungissa.
kaupunkiin is illative singular (“into the city”).
Formation:
- Basic form (nominative): kaupunki
- Illative singular ending: -Vn (vowel + n)
- For kaupunki, the vowel is doubled:
- kaupunki → kaupunkiin
Meaning:
- kaupunkiin = into the city / to the city
oli avannut is the past perfect (“had opened”), used to show that one past event happened before another past event.
- Kun muutin tähän kaupunkiin – past event 1
- yliopisto oli jo avannut uuden kirjaston – past event 2, which was already completed before event 1
Compare:
Yliopisto avasi uuden kirjaston, kun muutin tähän kaupunkiin.
→ Both events are just in the past; they are more or less at the same time or in sequence.Yliopisto oli avannut uuden kirjaston, kun muutin tähän kaupunkiin.
→ The opening happened earlier, and was already done by the time you moved.
So oli avannut corresponds to English “had opened”.
Finnish past perfect (pluskuvamperfekti) is:
imperfect of olla + active past participle of the main verb
For avata (“to open”):
- Imperfect of olla (3rd person): oli (“was” / “had” as an auxiliary)
- Active past participle of avata: avannut
Combine:
- oli avannut = “had opened”
Some more persons:
- Olin avannut – I had opened
- Olit avannut – you had opened
- Olimme avanneet – we had opened
- Olivat avanneet – they had opened
uuden kirjaston is the total object of the verb avata in a completed action.
Forms:
- Adjective:
- Nominative: uusi (“new”)
- Genitive: uuden
- Noun:
- Nominative: kirjasto (“library”)
- Genitive: kirjaston
In this sentence, the object is a single, whole library that has been fully opened (the action is completed and affects the whole thing). For singular count nouns in such cases, Finnish uses the so‑called accusative, whose form is identical to the genitive:
- uuden kirjaston = total object (formally genitive singular), “the new library (as a whole)”
If you said uusi kirjasto in the nominative, it wouldn’t fit as a direct object here.
This is the difference between a total object and a partial object (partitive).
- kirjaston – total object (genitive/accusative form), whole library, action is complete.
- kirjastoa – partitive object, used for:
- incomplete/ongoing actions
- unbounded amounts
- certain verbs that require partitive
In yliopisto oli jo avannut uuden kirjaston, the opening is a completed action, and the whole library has been opened. So Finnish uses the total object: kirjaston.
Something like Yliopisto avasi kirjastoa would sound like the opening was somehow incomplete or in progress, and is unusual in normal usage for this verb and context.
jo means “already”.
- yliopisto oli jo avannut uuden kirjaston
→ “the university had already opened a new library”
Usual position:
- jo typically comes before the main verb or participle it modifies:
- on jo tehnyt – has already done
- oli jo avannut – had already opened
- oli jo syönyt – had already eaten
You could also say yliopisto oli avannut jo uuden kirjaston, which is possible but changes the emphasis slightly; the most natural neutral placement here is oli jo avannut.
Yes, you can swap the order:
- Kun muutin tähän kaupunkiin, yliopisto oli jo avannut uuden kirjaston.
- Yliopisto oli jo avannut uuden kirjaston, kun muutin tähän kaupunkiin.
Both are grammatically correct and mean the same thing. The difference is mainly focus:
- Starting with Kun muutin… focuses first on you moving, then adds the background fact about the university.
- Starting with Yliopisto oli jo avannut… focuses first on what the university had done, then connects it to the time when you moved.
This flexibility in word order is typical in Finnish.
In this sentence, kun is a time conjunction meaning “when”:
- Kun muutin tähän kaupunkiin – “When I moved to this city…”
Key points:
- kun introduces a subordinate clause with a time meaning.
- It does not mean “if” here; that would be jos in Finnish.
- Depending on context, kun can also sometimes be closer to “as” / “since / because”, but here the straightforward meaning is purely temporal: “when”.
Finnish has no words like “a” or “the”, so the context decides whether English needs “a” or “the”.
- uuden kirjaston literally is just “new library” in object form.
- In English, if this library is being mentioned for the first time, we usually say “a new library”.
- If both speaker and listener already know which new library is meant, English would use “the new library”.
The Finnish form stays the same (uuden kirjaston); you choose “a” or “the” in English based on the broader context, not on any article in Finnish.