Why the use of 'lahjoittaa' here ?
"Presidentti sanoo, että rahaa voi lahjoittaa kahteen kohteeseen."

Hi I've noticed in Finnish that sometimes in news articles this construction is used - from the context I get that he is supposed to be using the past version of the verb, but the word used is in the singular.

So for example from the surrounding context it's clear this sentence means something like "The president says that money can be donated into two charities." but the word used is 'donates' and not 'donated'.

Can anyone explain this grammar to me ? Thanks.

Question

Why the use of 'lahjoittaa' here ?
"Presidentti sanoo, että rahaa voi lahjoittaa kahteen kohteeseen."

Hi I've noticed in Finnish that sometimes in news articles this construction is used - from the context I get that he is supposed to be using the past version of the verb, but the word used is in the singular.

So for example from the surrounding context it's clear this sentence means something like "The president says that money can be donated into two charities." but the word used is 'donates' and not 'donated'.

Can anyone explain this grammar to me ? Thanks.

Answer

In this sentence, "lahjoittaa" is not the 3rd person singular but the infinitive. The inflected verb here is "voi". If you change the word order a bit, you can translate the sentence almost word by word into English:

... että - that
voi - [one] can
lahjoittaa - donate   (infinitve in both languages)
rahaa - money 
kahteen kohteeseen = [in]to two charities

Note that "rahaa" is in the partitive case, so it's not the subject of the sentence but the object.

Answers · 2

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