Breakdown of Toisessa ottelussa he tekivät kolme maalia kymmenessä minuutissa.
Questions & Answers about Toisessa ottelussa he tekivät kolme maalia kymmenessä minuutissa.
All four are in the inessive case, which has the ending -ssa / -ssä (depending on vowel harmony).
The inessive basically means “in”:
- toisessa ottelussa = in the second match
- kymmenessä minuutissa = literally in ten minutes (here: within a period of ten minutes)
Base forms:
- toinen → toise-
- ssa → toisessa
- ottelu → ottelu-
- ssa → ottelussa
- kymmenen → kymmen-
- essä → kymmenessä
- minuutti → minuutti-
- ssa → minuutissa
Finnish often uses the inessive not only for physical location but also for time spans: something is completed in a certain amount of time.
Because toisessa is an ordinal number (literally “second”), and ordinals in Finnish behave like adjectives. Adjectives and ordinals must agree with the noun in:
- case
- number
- (and, when relevant, sometimes in other features)
So:
- Base forms: toinen ottelu = second match
- Inessive: toisessa ottelussa = in the second match
You cannot say:
- ✗ toinen ottelussa
- ✗ toisessa ottelu
Both words must be in the same case: inessive singular.
Another example:
- uusi talo = new house
- uudessa talossa = in the new house
After numbers greater than one, Finnish normally puts the noun into the partitive singular.
- maali = goal (nominative singular)
- maalia = goal (partitive singular)
With numbers:
- yksi maali = one goal (nominative singular)
- kaksi maalia = two goals (partitive singular)
- kolme maalia = three goals
- neljä maalia = four goals
You don’t say:
- ✗ kolme maalit
- ✗ kolme maali
This pattern is very regular:
- kaksi taloa = two houses
- viisi autoa = five cars
- kymmenen kirjaa = ten books
So kolme maalia is “three goals” using the standard Finnish number + partitive singular structure.
Tekivät is the past tense (imperfect) third person plural of the verb tehdä (to do, to make).
Verb: tehdä
- 3rd person plural present: he tekevät = they do / they make
- 3rd person plural past: he tekivät = they did / they made
You can see the stem change:
- Present stem: teke- → tekevät
- Past stem: teki- → tekivät
So in the sentence:
- he tekivät = they did / they made (here: they scored)
Yes, tehdä literally means “to do / to make”, but Finnish often uses it in light verb constructions where English uses more specific verbs.
Common sports expression:
- tehdä maali = to make a goal → to score a goal
So:
- He tekivät kolme maalia.
= They made three goals.
= They scored three goals.
Similarly, Finnish uses tehdä in expressions like:
- tehdä virhe = to make a mistake
- tehdä suunnitelma = to make a plan
There are other ways to talk about scoring (for example osua “to hit” in some contexts), but tehdä maali is the default, very idiomatic sports expression.
Kymmenessä minuutissa (inessive case) usually means “in ten minutes” in the sense of “within ten minutes / taking ten minutes to complete”, rather than just “for ten minutes”.
In this sentence:
- he tekivät kolme maalia kymmenessä minuutissa
= they scored three goals within a period of ten minutes
(i.e. the three goals were all scored during those ten minutes; it took ten minutes to get three goals)
Contrast with a pure duration expression using the partitive:
- He juoksivat kymmenen minuuttia.
= They ran for ten minutes (duration, no idea what was completed).
Here kymmenen minuuttia (partitive) is just “for 10 minutes”.
Kymmenessä minuutissa highlights that some result was achieved within that time frame.
Yes, you can say:
- He tekivät kolme maalia kymmenen minuutin aikana.
This means “They scored three goals over a period of ten minutes / in the course of ten minutes.”
Nuance:
- kymmenessä minuutissa – tends to stress how quickly something was achieved, almost like “in as little as ten minutes / within ten minutes”.
- kymmenen minuutin aikana – more neutral “during a ten-minute period”; it states the time span, but doesn’t emphasize speed or surprising quickness as much.
In sports commentary, both are acceptable. Kymmenessä minuutissa can feel a bit more dramatic or result-focused.
Finnish has several “location” cases. The two most common are:
- Inessive -ssa / -ssä = “in(side)” something
- Adessive -lla / -llä = “on / at” something, or near / associated with a place
Ottelu (“match, game”) is treated as an event you are in, so Finnish naturally uses the inessive:
- ottelussa = in the match
If you change to adessive ottelulla, it sounds wrong in this meaning. You don’t stand “on” a match; you’re participating in it.
Compare:
- stadionilla = at the stadium (adessive; a physical place)
- ottelussa = in the match (inessive; the event itself)
Finnish word order is fairly flexible, especially with adverbials (time and place expressions). The neutral, common pattern is:
- [time / place] + [subject] + [verb] + [object] + [other adverbials]
So the original:
- Toisessa ottelussa he tekivät kolme maalia kymmenessä minuutissa.
(Place first, then subject–verb–object, then time span.)
Other grammatical alternatives:
- He tekivät toisessa ottelussa kolme maalia kymmenessä minuutissa.
- He tekivät kolme maalia toisessa ottelussa kymmenessä minuutissa.
- Kymmenessä minuutissa he tekivät kolme maalia toisessa ottelussa.
All are possible; the difference is mainly emphasis and information structure.
The first element of the sentence is usually what you want to highlight as the starting point (topic or focus):
- Starting with Toisessa ottelussa highlights which match.
- Starting with Kymmenessä minuutissa highlights how fast it happened.
Grammatically, yes. Finnish often omits subject pronouns because the verb ending already shows the person and number.
- He tekivät = They did
- Tekivät (on its own) still clearly means “they did” from the verb ending -vät.
So:
- Toisessa ottelussa tekivät kolme maalia kymmenessä minuutissa.
is grammatically fine, especially if who “they” are has already been mentioned in the previous sentence.
Stylistic note:
- In everyday written Finnish (news, sports reports, etc.), speakers frequently keep hän / he in 3rd person, but dropping it is possible when the subject is obvious from context.
- In spoken Finnish, dropping subject pronouns is also common, particularly in 1st and 2nd person; in 3rd person it’s used but a bit less systematically.
So you can omit he, but make sure the reader or listener already knows who you’re talking about.
In kymmenessä minuutissa, only the last word carries the case ending for the whole phrase.
Structure:
- Base form: kymmenen minuuttia = ten minutes (number + noun in partitive singular)
- Inessive: kymmenessä minuutissa = in ten minutes (whole phrase in inessive)
Mechanism:
- The number kymmenen itself gets inflected:
- inessive of kymmenen → kymmenessä
- The noun minuutti also gets inflected into inessive singular:
- minuutissa
You do not make the number plural:
- ✗ kymmenissä minuutissa – wrong
- ✓ kymmenessä minuutissa – correct
Similarly:
- kolmen tunnin aikana = during three hours
(here the case ending is on tunnin (genitive), but the number kolme also changes to kolmen.)
The general idea: the whole number phrase behaves as one unit, and Finnish marks the needed case on its elements according to fixed patterns— you don’t just “add -ssa to the end” of the entire English phrase.