Breakdown of Poliisi pelastaa koiran järvestä.
Questions & Answers about Poliisi pelastaa koiran järvestä.
Finnish has no articles (a, an, the), so:
- Poliisi can mean “a police officer” or “the police officer”.
- Koiran can mean “a dog” or “the dog”.
Which one you choose in English depends entirely on context, not on any word in the Finnish sentence.
So the sentence can be translated as:
- “A police officer rescues a dog from the lake.”
- “The police officer rescues the dog from the lake.”
Both are grammatically correct translations of the same Finnish sentence.
Poliisi is in the nominative singular case, which is the basic dictionary form of nouns.
- Subjects of sentences usually appear in the nominative.
- Nominative often has no ending: poliisi, koira, järvi.
If there were several police officers, the subject would be plural nominative:
- Poliisit pelastavat koiran järvestä.
“The police officers rescue the dog from the lake.”
Here poliisit = plural nominative (“police officers”), and the verb changes to pelastavat (3rd person plural).
Pelastaa is:
- Person: 3rd person singular (“he/she/it” or “the police officer”)
- Tense: present (in Finnish: “present” is used for both present and general/ongoing actions)
- Dictionary form (infinitive): pelastaa (“to rescue, to save”)
Present tense conjugation of pelastaa:
- minä pelastan – I rescue
- sinä pelastat – you rescue
- hän pelastaa – he/she rescues
- me pelastamme – we rescue
- te pelastatte – you (pl.) rescue
- he pelastavat – they rescue
So poliisi pelastaa = “the police officer rescues / is rescuing”.
Koiran is the object of the verb, and it’s in the accusative/genitive form (ending -n).
In this kind of sentence:
- The action is completed or seen as affecting the whole object.
- With a singular, countable object, Finnish often uses the -n form:
- Poliisi pelastaa koiran. – The officer rescues the whole dog (successful, bounded event).
If it were just koira in basic nominative, it would usually be understood as a subject, not an object, so koiran is needed to show its role as a direct object here.
Both forms are possible, but they change the meaning slightly:
Koiran (accusative/genitive):
- The rescue is seen as complete / successful.
- Focus on the whole dog being rescued.
- Poliisi pelastaa koiran järvestä.
→ “The officer rescues the dog from the lake.” (the rescue goes through)
Koiraa (partitive):
- The action is ongoing, incomplete, or not necessarily successful.
- Focus on the activity rather than a finished result.
- Poliisi pelastaa koiraa järvestä.
→ “The officer is rescuing a dog from the lake.” / “The officer is trying to rescue a dog from the lake.”
So koiran = completed, result-oriented; koiraa = ongoing/attempt, process-oriented.
Järvestä is in the elative case. The elative ending is -sta / -stä and usually means:
- “out of”, “from inside”, or simply “from”.
So:
- järvi – lake (basic form)
- järvestä – from (out of) the lake
Common meanings of elative:
- talosta – from (out of) the house
- kaupungista – from the city
- kirjasta – from (out of) the book / from the book (as a source of info)
Many Finnish nouns have a strong stem (dictionary form) and a slightly different case stem.
- Dictionary form: järvi
- Stem for most cases: järve-
Then you just add case endings to the stem:
- järvi – nominative
- järven – genitive
- järveä – partitive
- järvessä – in the lake (-ssä = in)
- järvestä – from the lake (-stä = from out of)
- järveen – into the lake (-een = into)
The e in järve- is just part of the noun’s stem; it appears whenever you add many case endings.
In Finnish, case endings on nouns often replace what English expresses with prepositions.
- English: from the lake → preposition from
- noun lake
- Finnish: järvestä → noun stem järve-
- case ending -stä (“from, out of”)
Other examples:
- talossa – in the house (talo
- -ssa = in)
- talosta – from the house (talo
- -sta = from)
- taloon – into the house (talo
- -on = into)
So Finnish typically says what + ending instead of preposition + what.
The neutral word order here is indeed Subject – Verb – Object – (Place):
- Poliisi (subject) pelastaa (verb) koiran (object) järvestä (place).
But Finnish word order is fairly flexible because cases show who does what to whom. You can move parts for emphasis:
Koiran poliisi pelastaa järvestä.
→ Emphasis on koiran (“It’s the dog that the police officer rescues from the lake, not something else.”)Järvestä poliisi pelastaa koiran.
→ Emphasis on järvestä (“From the lake, the officer rescues the dog (as opposed to from somewhere else).”)
Grammatically it still works, but the default, neutral order is the one you have:
Poliisi pelastaa koiran järvestä.
To make it past tense, you change pelastaa (present) to pelasti (past, 3rd person singular):
- Poliisi pelasti koiran järvestä.
→ “The police officer rescued the dog from the lake.”
With a plural subject:
- Poliisit pelastivat koiran järvestä.
→ “The police officers rescued the dog from the lake.”
Notice the verb endings:
- singular past: pelasti
- plural past: pelastivat
Poliisi can mean both:
A single police officer (a person)
- Poliisi pelastaa koiran.
→ “A police officer rescues the dog.”
- Poliisi pelastaa koiran.
The police as an institution/force (more abstract)
- Poliisi tutkii tapausta.
→ “The police are investigating the case.”
- Poliisi tutkii tapausta.
If you clearly mean several officers as people, you normally use the plural:
- Poliisit pelastavat koiran.
→ “(The) police officers rescue the dog.”
So context decides whether you think of poliisi as one officer or “the police” in general.