# upeasti



## Gavril

Päivää,

Löysin tänään seuraavan lauseen HS-lehdestä:

"Vanhempiensa aloittaman hyväntekeväisyysjärjestön pärjäämisen selittävät Hurstin mukaan isot liikkeet, joita on 'todella upeasti mukana'."

En ymmärrä " ... joita on todella upeasti mukana" : tarkoittaako saman kuin esimerkiksi "... joita on todella hirveästi (= paljon) tässä alueessa", vai sanooko  liikkeiden olevan upeita?

Kiitoksia paljon


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## Grumpy Old Man

""Vanhempiensa aloittaman hyväntekeväisyysjärjestön pärjäämisen selittävät Hurstin mukaan isot liikkeet, joita on 'todella upeasti mukana'."

Yes, you have guessed (?) the meaning of informal 'todella upeasti mukana' correctly. It does mean that there is an amazing lot of them involved.

However, the sentence is ungrammatical in another respect. The possessive suffix _nsa_ in _vanhempiensa_ should be followed later in the sentence by a word in the third grammatical person (_hän, se, he_ or a noun in the nominative case, for example): _Vanhempie*nsa* aloittaman/perustaman hyväntekeväisyysjärjestön pärjäämisen/menestymisen Hursti selittää..._

Mistakes like these are increasingly common in newspapers and even on the radio. Since less and less attention is paid to the complicated grammar of the Finnish language in schools, fewer and fewer professional journalists are aware of the pitfalls of the language.

Many points of grammar that are a piece of cake in the Germanic or Romance languages represent insurmountable problems for professional users of Finnish: _I told him for the 639th time_ is too difficult for many of them, and so are the correct forms of the comparison of adjectives and adverbs. This may come as a surprise for speakers of languages in which one only needs to add an inflection to an adjective or to add a word (more, the most) before it for comparison.

Your Finnish is good, by the way! I wish you a lot of success in your linguistic studies.


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## Gavril

Grumpy Old Man said:


> Many points of grammar that are a piece of cake in the Germanic or Romance languages represent insurmountable problems for professional users of Finnish: _I told him for the 639th time_ is too difficult for many of them



I'm guessing that you mean the problem of inflecting five (?) words in _639th_ rather than just one. For me, the biggest problem in translating _I told him for the 639th time _is how to translate this particular use of _for_: would you use the _-ksi_ suffix, or a different one?



> Your Finnish is good, by the way! I wish you a lot of success in your linguistic studies.


Thanks! I wish there were a Finnish-specific forum on Wordreference, as I haven't been able to find one elsewhere on the web.


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## Grumpy Old Man

Gavril said:


> I'm guessing that you mean the problem of inflecting five (?) words in _639th_ rather than just one. For me, the biggest problem in translating _I told him for the 639th time _is how to translate this particular use of _for_: would you use the _-ksi_ suffix, or a different one?


_"Sanoin hänelle kuudennen sadannen kolmannen kymmenennen yhdeksännen kerran._"

I must admit I'm not sure whether Kielitoimisto (= the Finnish Language Academy) wants to write the whole thing as *one* word or not!


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## Hakro

> I must admit I'm not sure whether Kielitoimisto (= the Finnish Language Academy) wants to write the whole thing as *one* word or not!


Not as one word, but not as you wrote neither.

Obviously the recommendable form is _"... kuudennensadannen kolmannenkymmenennenyhdeksännen kerran"_ but it seems that there are no absolutely strict rules. On this Kielitoimisto site where they give some rules they write both _"__kaksisataakuusikymmentäviisi"and "__kahdellesadalle neljällekymmenellekuudelle"._


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