Breakdown of Onneksi hammaslääkärin tarkastus ei peruuntunut, vaan kaikki meni loistavasti.
Questions & Answers about Onneksi hammaslääkärin tarkastus ei peruuntunut, vaan kaikki meni loistavasti.
Onneksi is an adverb meaning luckily / fortunately. It is very common as a sentence adverb that comments on the whole sentence:
- Onneksi hammaslääkärin tarkastus ei peruuntunut.
= Fortunately, the dentist’s check-up wasn’t cancelled.
Onneksi comes from the noun onni (luck, fortune).
Onnekkaasti is more like in a lucky way and is much less common in everyday speech. In this kind of sentence, onneksi is the natural choice; onnekkaasti would sound odd or overly literal.
In Finnish, when one noun specifies another (like dentist’s check-up, car door, teacher’s book), the first noun often appears in the genitive:
- hammaslääkärin tarkastus = the dentist’s check-up / examination
(hammaslääkäri → genitive hammaslääkärin)
So it literally means the check-up of the dentist, i.e. “the check-up with the dentist”.
Using simply hammaslääkäri tarkastus would be ungrammatical in standard Finnish.
You might sometimes see compounds (written together) like hammaslääkärintarkastus, but that is less common and looks more technical or “official sign” style.
The genitive (-n) is used for many kinds of relationships between nouns, including:
- possession: opettajan kirja = the teacher’s book
- type / specification: auton ovi = the car door (the door of a car)
- time expressions: maanantain kokous = Monday’s meeting
Here hammaslääkärin tarkastus is literally the check-up of the dentist.
It describes what kind of tarkastus it is and with whom it is. That is why hammaslääkäri appears as its genitive hammaslääkärin.
- perua = to cancel something (transitive: someone cancels something)
- peruuntua = to be cancelled, to get cancelled (intransitive: it cancels itself / happens to it)
Examples:
Lääkäri perui tarkastuksen.
The doctor cancelled the check-up. (perua)Tarkastus peruuntui.
The check-up was cancelled / got cancelled. (peruuntua)
In your sentence, the focus is on the appointment itself: it did not get cancelled, regardless of who might have cancelled it. So Finnish uses the intransitive verb:
- tarkastus ei peruuntunut = the check-up did not get cancelled
Finnish negation uses a special negative verb (en, et, ei, emme, ette, eivät) plus the main verb in a participle form.
For 3rd person singular past:
- positive: tarkastus peruuntui
- negative: tarkastus ei peruuntunut
Structure of the negative past here:
- ei = 3rd person singular negative verb
- peruuntunut = past active participle of peruuntua
So literally: “the check-up not-cancelled” → “the check-up did not get cancelled”.
Both can be translated as but, but they are used in different situations.
- mutta = general but, contrast
- vaan = but rather / but instead, used when correcting or replacing something, often after a negation
In your sentence:
- First part: ei peruuntunut (it did not get cancelled)
- Second part: vaan kaikki meni loistavasti (but instead, everything went brilliantly)
This is exactly the typical negation + correction pattern, so vaan is correct.
If you used mutta here, it would sound off to a native speaker.
Kaikki meni loistavasti literally:
- kaikki = everything (here)
- meni = went
- loistavasti = excellently / brilliantly
So: everything went excellently.
Kaikki can mean both:
- everything: Kaikki on hyvin. = Everything is fine.
- everyone: Kaikki tulivat ajoissa. = Everyone arrived on time.
In your sentence, it clearly means everything, because it refers to how the whole situation went.
- loistava = brilliant, excellent (adjective)
- loistavasti = brilliantly, excellently (adverb)
You need an adverb here because you are describing how things went:
- kaikki meni loistavasti = everything went excellently / in an excellent way
Using loistava after meni would be ungrammatical, because meni loistava is like saying “went excellent” instead of “went excellently”.
Pattern:
Finnish often forms adverbs with -sti from adjectives:
- hyvä → hyvin (irregular)
- nopea → nopeasti
- loistava → loistavasti
Yes, Finnish word order is flexible, and moving words affects emphasis more than basic meaning.
Some natural variants:
Onneksi hammaslääkärin tarkastus ei peruuntunut, vaan kaikki meni loistavasti.
– Neutral; onneksi comments on the whole situation.Hammaslääkärin tarkastus ei onneksi peruuntunut, vaan kaikki meni loistavasti.
– Slightly stronger focus on the fact that it did not get cancelled; onneksi is closer to what it qualifies.Onneksi hammaslääkärin tarkastus ei peruuntunut, vaan meni loistavasti.
– More compact; kaikki is dropped. Meaning is similar, but the original kaikki meni emphasizes that everything about it went well.
All are grammatical; the differences are mostly in emphasis and style.
Both are possible, but they have slightly different uses:
kaikki meni loistavasti
Simple past; typical for narrating a completed event (like storytelling or summarizing what happened).kaikki on mennyt loistavasti
Present perfect; emphasises the result up to now or the relevance to the present.
In everyday speech, when summarizing how an appointment went, Finns very often use the simple past:
- Kaikki meni loistavasti. = Everything went great.
The perfect on mennyt is also correct, but can sound a bit more formal or reflective.
Both are related to checking, but they are used differently:
tarkastus
– inspection, examination, check-up
– used for medical check-ups: lääkärintarkastus, hammaslääkärin tarkastus
– also for official inspections: tullitarkastus (customs inspection)tarkistus
– check, verification, double-checking something
– e.g. laskun tarkistus = checking a bill, oikeinkirjoituksen tarkistus = spell-check
For a dentist’s check-up, the natural word is tarkastus, not tarkistus.
So hammaslääkärin tarkistus would sound wrong or at least unusual in this meaning.