Talk:Possessive adjective
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
[edit] some languages dont have possessives
It requires more explanation: in finnish meidän means our [1] minun means my [2]
what part of speech are these words? Mrdthree 03:23, 27 July 2006 (UTC)
- meidän and minun are posessive pronouns (in practice, the pronouns of me, we and minä, I, in the genitive case). But they can also work as determiners.
- Tämä on meidän talomme This is our house (formal written language)
- Tämä on meiän talo This is our house (less formal spoken language)
- Tämä talo on meiän This house is ours
-
- Note the difference with our as possessive determiner and ours as a possessive pronoun. So the language dictionary you referenced does not give the two main possible translations for meidän or minun. In Finnish, gentitive pronoun suffices for both so the response is overly "english" biased and "academic" for the Finnish language part of speech. --Tom 00:34, 10 March 2007 (UTC)
