Minä kävelen ympäri puistoa.

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Breakdown of Minä kävelen ympäri puistoa.

• puisto: the park
• kävellä: to walk
• ympäri: around

Questions & Answers about Minä kävelen ympäri puistoa.

What does ympäri mean exactly here, and is it a preposition or something else in Finnish?

Ympäri basically means around in the sense of around in a circular / scattered way in some area.

Grammatically, ympäri is usually called a postposition, because it often comes after a noun (for example: talon ympäri = around the house).

However, in the sentence Minä kävelen ympäri puistoa, ympäri appears before the noun in English order, but structurally it still behaves like a postposition that governs a certain case (here, the partitive: puistoa). You can think of it as a word that requires a certain case on the noun to complete its meaning: around (what?) → around the park.

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Why is it puistoa and not puisto or puiston?