The Finnish passive is a very common and important verb form. It indicates
that the action of the verb is performed by an unspecified person, i.e. that the
agent is impersonal (indefinite). It thus roughly corresponds to Swedish and
German ‘man’, French ‘on’ and English ‘one’. The passive has two endings:
the passive marker itself, which is -tta- ~ -ttä- or -ta- ~ -tä-, and a special
personal ending -Vn, e.g. sano/ta/an ‘one says, it is said’.
Passive sentences should be distinguished from generic sentences
expressing a general truth or law or state of affairs. The predicate verb of
generic sentences appears in the third person singular active and there is no
separate subject:
Usein kuule/e, että… One often hears that…
Siellä saa hyvää kahvia. One gets good coffee there.
Tästä näke/e hyvin. You/one can see well from here.
Jos juokse/e joka aamu, tule/e If you run every morning you will
terveeksi. become healthy.
The passive occurs in all tenses (present, past, perfect and pluperfect) and
also all moods (indicative, conditional, imperative and potential). The basic
pattern of the passive forms is illustrated in the table below.
Root Passive Tense, Person Particle
mood
sano ta an one says (pass. pres.)
sano tt i in one said (pass. past)
sano tta isi in one would say (pass. cond.)
sano tta ne en one may say (pass. pot.)
sano tta ko on let one say (pass. imp.)
sano ta an han one does say (pass. pres.)
sano tt i in ko did one say? (pass. past)
The passive 173
In this chapter, however, the formation of the passive will not be described as
the addition of these endings: we do not need to say for instance that the
passive present is formed by adding the endings -ta- and -Vn: sano/ta/an
‘one says’. Instead, we shall make use of a number of ‘short cuts’ which are
available because the passive happens to resemble several forms we have
already discussed, in particular the infinitive. In this way many of the
complex sound alternations in the passive can be derived automatically.
