Omission of The Negative Verb
When a negative sentence is formed, the main verb goes into the imperative mood and gives all of its inflections to the negative verb ei, e.g. tuemme → emme tue. Usually the word mitään ("anything") and an expletive is added to the sentence. This means that even if the negative verb ei is left out, the meaning is indicated by this context. For example:
- Ei se mitään osaa. "He doesn't know anything."
- Se mitään osaa. "He know anything." ("doesn't" omitted)
This omission of the negative verb ei is considered one of the most recent changes in Finnish. Usually this construction indicates mistrust or frustration. (There is a less than serious text calling this aggressiivi.) However, it can be a neutral negative statement: Tästä artikkelista mitään opi (From this article, you don't learn anything).
Read more about this topic: Colloquial Finnish
Famous quotes containing the words omission of, omission, negative and/or verb:
“If we remembered everything, we should on most occasions be as ill off as if we remembered nothing. It would take us as long to recall a space of time as it took the original time to elapse, and we should never get ahead with our thinking. All recollected times undergo, accordingly, what M. Ribot calls foreshortening; and this foreshortening is due to the omission of an enormous number of facts which filled them.”
—William James (1842–1910)
“If we remembered everything, we should on most occasions be as ill off as if we remembered nothing. It would take us as long to recall a space of time as it took the original time to elapse, and we should never get ahead with our thinking. All recollected times undergo, accordingly, what M. Ribot calls foreshortening; and this foreshortening is due to the omission of an enormous number of facts which filled them.”
—William James (1842–1910)
“Mothers often are too easily intimidated by their children’s negative reactions...When the child cries or is unhappy, the mother reads this as meaning that she is a failure. This is why it is so important for a mother to know...that the process of growing up involves by definition things that her child is not going to like. Her job is not to create a bed of roses, but to help him learn how to pick his way through the thorns.”
—Elaine Heffner (20th century)
“The word is the Verb, and the Verb is God.”
—Victor Hugo (1802–1885)