#2 - Everything happens
The diversity of life testifies to the ingenuity of evolution, which slowly shapes sophisticated species and robust organisms, highly capable of adapting to their environment. The fascinating book Kaikkea sattuu features essays by Finnish researchers that examine the role of chance in various fields of life and science. The chapter Geenit ja päämäärätön evoluutio focuses on the role of chance at work in evolution. We draw from it our Finnish sentence of the day, and apply our method to it unwaveringly. Follow our Finnish learning the machine way.
Here is our long sentence followed by its automatic translation.
Valintahan tarkoittaa sitä, että hyvin ominaisuuksin varustetut yksilöt pärjäävät ja siirtävät geenejään seuraavaan sukupolveen muita paremmin.
After all, selection means that individuals equipped with favorable traits fare better and pass on their genes to the next generation more successfully than others.
We have two clauses, a main clause selection means, and a long subordinate clause introduced by the subordinating conjunction that. This subordinate clause has two verb phrases coordinated with each other by the conjunction and. So much for the skeleton. The dissection begins.
We immediately note a little something in the Finnish sentence that the English one doesn’t have, a comma. Could this be our boundary between main clause and subordinate clause? Likely. On either side, two little words sitä and että entirely good candidates for adverbs or conjunctions. We would then have the match
Valintahan tarkoittaa sitä, että hyvin ominaisuuksin varustetut yksilöt pärjäävät ja siirtävät geenejään seuraavaan sukupolveen muita paremmin.
After all, selection means that individuals equipped with favorable traits fare better and pass on their genes to the next generation more successfully than others.
A few clues already confirm the hypothesis: in the remaining chunk, we find two similar forms coordinated by and: pärjäävät and siirtävät. Our sentence #1 contained the conjugated auxiliary (to be) ovat and we easily interpret the suffix -vät as a mark of verbal inflection. In the second verbal phrase, after ja, something has to do with genes: geenejään. (There are few, very few clear words in Finnish for a native of a language other than, well, Finnish, maybe Estonian, and smaller or rarer Finnic languages. The likelihood your mother tongue is Karelian, Ludic, or Veps is however objectively quite low. But when you find some obvious ones, such as geenejään, those are perfect anchors for your investigations.) So hypothetically we have
Valintahan tarkoittaa sitä, että hyvin ominaisuuksin varustetut yksilöt pärjäävät ja siirtävät geenejään seuraavaan sukupolveen muita paremmin.
After all, selection means that individuals equipped with favorable traits fare better and pass on their genes to the next generation more successfully than others.
which speaks in favor of our discrimination of the main and subordinate clauses, one short and one very long.
Let’s look more closely at our probable main clause:
Valintahan tarkoittaa sitä, että …
After all, selection means that …
We stumble here upon a first mystery. Nothing, radically nothing seems to fill the role of after all. sitä, että around our boundary seems to serve for subordination. There remains the probable bijection between valintahan tarkoittaa and selection means.
Let’s refine the correspondences. Tarkoittaa is the conjugated form of a frequent verb of a frequent type. A frequent verb, simply to mean - to signify, to refer to. Its type is frequent - likely, with 3,485 entries in Wiktionary, the most frequent. In Kotus it corresponds to the model muistaa: « Ending in ⟨-ä-⟩ or ⟨-a-⟩, 2+ syllables. If ending in ⟨-a⟩ and 2 syllables, rounded vowel (⟨o⟩ or ⟨u⟩) in first syllable. Final-syllable gradation possible. » (A few details need to be clarified, but we get the most important. Kotus is the Institute for the Languages of Finland. It lists 27 types of conjugations - which an English grammar of Finnish typically groups into 6 groups.) When we say the model is muistaa, muistaa designates here the dictionary form of the verb, or first infinitive, in its short form (it also has a long one). First infinitive « corresponds in meaning and function to the English infinitive introduced by the particle to. » And for the very case of muistaa and its siblings, the indicative present 3rd pers. singular is identical to the first infinitive - muistaa, and tarkoittaa.
Valintahan tarkoittaa sitä, että …
After all, selection means that …
It’s then highly probable for valintahan to be our subject, in its plain nominative form. This is even more obvious to a Germanist or otherwise practitioner of many a Germanic language. Via the Old High German wellen, German has wählen (to choose) and via the Old Norse velja, Swedish has välja and Norwegian Bokmål velge. How can they be acquainted, as they climb completely different language family trees? Well, separate trees sometimes borrow from each other, at times in history where the populations come close. And here it seems the Proto-Finnic *valit’ak borrows from the Proto-Germanic *waljaną, some of whose descendants we just evoked.
And yet, one would be hard-pressed to find valintahan in the dictionary. One finds valinta, which is a nominative just as we wish, and of which, moreover, no inflection makes valintahan.
Key to the mystery - nothing prevents searching for an intriguing suffix in Wiktionary, which lists a great number of them. Thus, one learns that -han in Finnish is a particle, with three large families of meaning: emphasis, politeness, and surprise. And in its emphatic meaning, it can among others mean after all, in any case, although. Here is our after all! Very simple then, valinta-han, where the particle is the emphatic after all, and the rest follows naturally.
Valintahan tarkoittaa sitä, että …
After all, selection means that …Valintahan tarkoittaa sitä, että …
After all, selection means that …
A word on our strange subordination engine in two parts. Sitä is the partitive of the demonstrative pronoun se. So, something like means that, that... where the first that is the demonstrative pronoun (sitä), the second the subordination conjunction (että). The former is working as a placeholder to link the verb tarkoittaa to the subordinate clause introduced by the latter. Why the partitive? Is it a fixed expression? It doesn’t look like it. In depends on the fact that, giving riippuu siitä, että..., the demonstrative siitä with two -i-’s is in the elative case. It depends then, precisely, on the government of the main clause’s verb - on the case systematically called for by it. Tarkoittaa calls for the partitive, hence sitä.
Let’s tackle the main course. Here are our hypotheses so far.
… hyvin ominaisuuksin varustetut yksilöt pärjäävät ja siirtävät geenejään seuraavaan sukupolveen muita paremmin.
… individuals equipped with favorable traits fare better and pass on their genes to the next generation more successfully than others.
In quest of a subject in the nominative plural. One that means individuals. Yksilöt! -t is the typical ending for a nominative plural. Yksi is the numeral one. Yksi-something can well be individual, the Latin indīviduum, the atomic one, that cannot be divided. The chunks stuck to the left of the verb pärjäävät must also surely correspond.
… hyvin ominaisuuksin varustetut yksilöt …
… individuals equipped with favorable traits …
What is glaring is the respective position of the noun in Finnish and English. One must get used to this Finnish way of « building long and complex noun phrases backwards » - a point of view, notably, of an Anglophone. Note that German also sometimes builds backwards, notably when the past participle used as an attributive adjective has a complement.
mit bronzenen Griffen ausgestattete Türen
doors equipped with bronze handles
Without a complement to the adjective, the German and English constructions are closer, it seems.
gut ausgestattete Küche
well-equipped kitchen
So here varustetut is our participle used as an attributive adjective, and hyvin ominaisuuksin is its complement, visibly in the instructive case. Instructive « has the basic meaning of by means of. » It is further said to be « a comparatively rarely used case, mostly used in fixed expressions and with a very few exceptions always in the plural ».
omin silmin → with (my) own eyes
käsin → by hand
jalokivin koristeltu →decorated with jewels
With hyvin ominaisuuksin varustetut, we are close semantically to this last example. Note that hyvin is here the instructive plural of the adjective hyvä - while there also exists the adverb hyvin, resulting precisely from a fossilization of the same instructive form, which means well, as in I’m doing well, voin hyvin.
All in all, we have
… hyvin ominaisuuksin varustetut yksilöt …
… individuals equipped with favorable traits …
… hyvin ominaisuuksin varustetut yksilöt …
… individuals equipped with favorable traits …
… hyvin ominaisuuksin varustetut yksilöt …
… individuals equipped with favorable traits …
The grammatical subject of the subordinate clause being clarified, let’s see the verbs and their complements. Identification requires no dictionary: pärjäävät can only be fare and siirtävät, pass on.
… hyvin ominaisuuksin varustetut yksilöt pärjäävät ja siirtävät geenejään seuraavaan sukupolveen muita paremmin.
… individuals equipped with favorable traits fare better and pass on their genes to the next generation more successfully than others.
Pass on what? - Their genes (direct object) to the next generation (indirect object). The form of seuraavaan sukupolveen reminds us perhaps of the illative from exercise #1, viimeisiin päiviin. Illative formed by suffixing to the strong vowel stem « -Vn, where V indicates the preceding vowel of the stem ». (The strong vowel stem is, succinctly, the inflected stem ending in a vowel, with consonants not undergoing the phenomenon of consonant gradation. You guessed it: there is a weak vowel stem, where the consonants do undergo consonant gradation. We will soon clarify the notions of inflected stem and consonant gradation; for now, let’s keep in mind that very often, the illative forms by appending a suffix -Vn to some inflected stem ending in a vowel V.)
Why on earth would the locative case illative - the space into which we go - serve the formation of the indirect object? Remarkably, English uses quite similarly the same to, or its close parent into, in both usages. To go to the kitchen and to give a treat to the dog. Here again, it is a question of verb government. Siirtää expresses pragmatically the relocating, moving of something to somewhere, where this to somewhere is, unsurprisingly, in the illative. It also means transferring - to someone - or postponing - to some later time - and there also, by metaphor, the indirect object takes the illative. How to be sure? Let’s move on to the monolingual dictionary. The entry siirtää abounds with examples featuring the illative.
Siirtää jku toiseen virkaan, ylempään palkkausluokkaan.
To transfer someone to another position, to a higher salary grade.
So here we are with our gene transfer
… ja siirtävät geenejään seuraavaan sukupolveen muita paremmin.
… and pass on their genes to the next generation more successfully than others.
Strangely, geenejään, expected to be our direct object, looks a bit like an illative with its -ään ending. And as expected, it is not. If you type geenejään in the Wiktionary search, what you get is geeni, of which geenejä is the partitive plural. Not there yet, there is some -än suffix. You notice as well that the translation has a possessive - their genes. The Finnish version apparently has none. Precisely because the possessive determiner translates, in Finnish, by help of a suffix. If we expand the 3rd pers. plural possessive declension table in the Wiktionary page for geeni, here it is: the partitive plural (the genes) 3rd pers. plural possessive form (their genes) is geenejänsä, or geenejään. The textbook ending for the 3rd person possessive, singular or plural, is actually -nsä/-nsa. Yet it seems quite usual to use a shortened form in -Vn where V is the last vowel of the case suffix. Here our inflected base is geenejä and we append -än.
… ja siirtävät geenejään seuraavaan sukupolveen muita paremmin.
… and pass on their genes to the next generation more successfully than others.
Almost there; what remains is the comparative. The translation renders it in two chunks: better in fare better, and more successfully regarding the gene transfer. This is a stylistic choice we won’t argue about - you don’t really argue with a machine anyway - but the Finnish has one comparative form, and it is muita paremmin. Paremmin is ultra-famous; this is the comparative of the adverb hyvin, which we know means well.
hyvin (well) -> paremmin (better) -> parhaiten (best).
You don’t have to force yourself to remember it: you’ll come across them so many times they will imprint in your memory before you fall asleep. One way to build the complement of the comparative is with the partitive - especially in fixed or very regular expressions, here with the noun others, muita.
… ja siirtävät geenejään seuraavaan sukupolveen muita paremmin.
… and pass on their genes to the next generation more successfully than others.
Do we proceed like this tirelessly? Yes, this is the core exercise of learning languages like a machine. There is a plethora of variations on the theme, but in fine, the technique we are outlining constitutes the hard core. What do you do after dissecting such a sentence down to the marrow? When we aim for perfection, we reread it. Without the translation, striving to reconstruct the translation piece by piece. And if you succeed in retrieving the translation piece by piece and with precision - well, then you are able to read and understand the sentence in Finnish. This sentence, and numerous sentences that resemble it, and which resemble all the sentences you have dissected this way until now - so that one day, in the not-too-distant future, you will succeed in reading, in extenso, scholarly books on luck in Finnish. We are making good progress.
References
Hetemäki, I., Raento, P., Sariola, H., & Seppä, T. (Eds.). (2015). Kaikkea sattuu. Gaudeamus.
Kotimaisten kielten keskus. (2024). Siirtää. In Kielitoimiston sanakirja. Retrieved February 13, 2026, from https://www.kielitoimistonsanakirja.fi/#/siirt%C3%A4%C3%A4?searchMode=all