Breakdown of Kirjoitan seminaarista pöytäkirjan, johon merkitään opiskelijoiden kysymykset ja puhujien vastaukset.
Questions & Answers about Kirjoitan seminaarista pöytäkirjan, johon merkitään opiskelijoiden kysymykset ja puhujien vastaukset.
Seminaarista is elative case (the -sta / -stä ending), usually translated as from or about.
The verb kirjoittaa often takes the elative when you mean “write about something”:
- kirjoitan seminaarista pöytäkirjan
= I will write the minutes about the seminar.
Compare:
- kirjoitan kirjettä ystävälleni – I am writing a letter to my friend.
- kirjoitan politiikasta – I write about politics.
So seminaariSTA here means “about the seminar”, not physical movement from a place.
Pöytäkirjan is genitive singular, used here as a total object.
Finnish distinguishes:
- Genitive object (pöytäkirjan): the action is seen as complete/whole, with a clear, bounded result.
- Kirjoitan pöytäkirjan. = I will write (and complete) the minutes.
- Partitive object (pöytäkirjaa): the action is ongoing, incomplete, or unbounded.
- Kirjoitan pöytäkirjaa. = I am (in the middle of) writing the minutes.
In the given sentence, the idea is that you will produce a complete minutes document, so pöytäkirjan (genitive, total object) is used.
Johon is a form of the relative pronoun joka.
- Basic form: joka = who, which, that
- Here: johon = illative singular of joka (“into which / to which”).
It refers back to pöytäkirjan:
- pöytäkirjan, johon merkitään…
= the minutes, into which are recorded…
The illative is used because the verb merkitä (pöytäkirjaan) conceptually puts information into the document. You can think of:
- merkitä pöytäkirjaAN → pöytäkirjan, johon merkitään
(same case idea: illative -an / -en / -iin “into”.)
Using jossa (“in which”) would focus a bit more on being inside the minutes, but with this verb the “into which (they are entered)” idea fits better, so johon (illative) is natural.
Merkitään is the present passive / impersonal form of merkitä.
- Verb: merkitä = to mark, to record, to note down
- Passive: merkitään = “is/are recorded”, “will be entered”
In this sentence:
- …johon merkitään opiskelijoiden kysymykset ja puhujien vastaukset.
= “…into which the students’ questions and the speakers’ answers are recorded.”
The passive in Finnish:
- does not name who performs the action (like English people record, they record, are recorded).
- form: merkitä → merkitään (verb stem + -taan / -tään passive ending).
So the sentence focuses on what happens to the questions and answers, not on who writes them down.
Here kysymykset is a total object in the plural (nominative plural).
- opiskelijoiden kysymykset
= the students’ questions (all of them / the full set that is relevant)
If you said opiskelijoiden kysymyksiä, that would be partitive plural, and would suggest an indefinite or partial amount:
- merkitään opiskelijoiden kysymykset
= the students’ questions (the whole set) are recorded. - merkitään opiskelijoiden kysymyksiä
= some (unspecified number) of the students’ questions are recorded.
Because the idea here is “the questions (that the students ask)” as a defined set, kysymykset (not kysymyksiä) fits better.
Both are genitive plural forms that express possession or association.
- opiskelija → opiskelijoiden = of the students
- puhuja → puhujien = of the speakers
They work like English students’ and speakers’:
- opiskelijoiden kysymykset
= the students’ questions - puhujien vastaukset
= the speakers’ answers
Formally:
- opiskelija (student)
→ plural stem opiskelija-
→ genitive plural opiskelijoiden - puhuja (speaker)
→ plural stem puhuja-
→ genitive plural puhujien
So the pattern is: [genitive plural “owner”] + [noun] to show “X’s Y” / “Y of X”.
Finnish treats this as one document, so it uses a singular noun:
- pöytäkirja = the minutes / the official record of a meeting
English has a special plural-only word minutes for this; Finnish does not. It sees the minutes as a single record, like:
- pöytäkirja – minutes, (meeting) protocol
- raportti – report
If there were several different sets of minutes, Finnish could say pöytäkirjat (plural), but for one meeting it’s naturally one pöytäkirja.
Yes, you can say:
- Kirjoitan pöytäkirjan seminaarista.
- Kirjoitan seminaarista pöytäkirjan.
Both are grammatical and mean essentially the same: I will write the minutes about the seminar.
The difference is mainly in information structure / emphasis:
- Kirjoitan seminaarista pöytäkirjan.
Slightly stronger focus on seminaariSTA first: From the seminar, I will write the minutes. - Kirjoitan pöytäkirjan seminaarista.
Slightly stronger focus on pöytäkirjaN first: I will write the minutes (about the seminar).
In normal speech both orders are fine; context and intonation decide what feels more natural.
The part starting with johon is a relative clause that describes pöytäkirjan:
- pöytäkirjan, johon merkitään opiskelijoiden kysymykset…
= the minutes, into which the students’ questions are recorded…
In standard written Finnish, a comma is used before a relative clause introduced by a form of joka (joka, jota, johon, jossa, josta, jolla, jne.) when it directly modifies a noun.
So the comma marks the beginning of that descriptive clause about the minutes.
In this sentence, johon is the most natural choice because it clearly refers back to pöytäkirjan.
- pöytäkirjan, johon merkitään…
= the minutes, into which are recorded…
Mihin / minne are typically:
- question words: Mihin merkitään kysymykset? – Where are the questions recorded?
- or more informal/generic relatives in spoken Finnish.
In careful written language, when the antecedent (pöytäkirja) is mentioned explicitly, a joka-form (here: johon) is preferred to show the connection clearly. Using mihin in this exact sentence would sound more colloquial and a bit less precise in standard written Finnish.