# meillä....



## Canadian Daisy

Heippa 

The original sentance: "meillä ei niinkään."

Does it mean 'we do not have much'? I'm confused if miellä means 'we have' or if it means similar to 'at our place'.... And I'm not completely sure I've interpreted niinkään correctly to mean 'so much'. 

(I'm good with "ei")


And another original sentance: "mistään eikä mitään."

Does it mean 'anything not nothing'? I'm not sure the difference between mistään and mitään, they sometimes seem interchangeable...?


And lastly - sorry this is such a long post, took time away from practicing and it's showing now, but "sillee"? I'm thinking it's slang....?

Kittos paljon


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## jonquiliser

"Meillä ei niinkään" refers to something said previously, stating that for us, things are not like that. If you said you have a lot of something and they answered "meillä ei niinkään", then yes, it would mean they don't have a lot. But it could mean anything else also. Niinkään does not mean "so much"; it means more something like "not that way".

"...mistään eikä mitään..." isn't a complete sentence and it's impossible to say what it means without its context. It doesn't mean anything as a fragment. 
En ole sitä löytänyt mistään= I haven't found it anywhere (mistään=from anywhere/nowhere)
En tiedä mitään= I don't know anything.


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## Canadian Daisy

Ok, thank you  Still getting the hang of how much the meaning of things in finnish depends on their placement/context 

And "sille"? ...slang?


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## Grumpy Old Man

Canadian Daisy said:


> "sillee"? I'm thinking it's slang....?
> 
> Kittos paljon


It's *kiitos*_ paljon._ Actually even that is ungrammatical but almost everybody uses it in conversation. You can't say _kirja paljon_ or _raha paljon_ in Finnish but in spite of that people do say _kiitos paljon._ The grammatically correct expression is _paljon kiitoksia._

You haven't made up your mind whether you are interested in _sillee_ (which is in your first post) or _sille_ (your second post). _Sillee_ would require more context. The word is very informal and perhaps dialectal as well. The final n has been left out: _silleen._ Even that word is informal. It often means "in that way" but can have other meanings too. In informal Finnish _ja sillee_ may mean "and so on." There may be other meanings as well, I'm not sure.

As for _sille_, it's in inflected form of the pronoun _se:
Can you do anything about *it*? = Voitko tehdä mitään *sille*?_

In spoken Finnsih _se_ is often used to refer to a person instead of the official _hän:
I gave him/her some money. = Annoin *sille/hänelle* rahaa._
This usage is frowned upon by grammarians, though.


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