reading log: Tornilinnan aarre, page 9

Pojat kaarsivat seuraavan mutkan taitavasti ja aloittivat pitkän jyrkän nousun rinnettä ylös. Tällä kohdin tien pinta oli kurja ja ehdottomasti korjauksen tarpeessa.

I confess I had trouble deciphering "aloittivat […] ylös" because I forgot "aloittaa" can be used with nouns. But I guess one can "aloittaa nousun" just as well as one can "aloittaa nousemisen"(?). "Tällä kohdin tien pinta" isn't easy to figure out either; "kohdin tien pinta" looks like it should be one phrase, [the surface of [the road that was "kohti"]], but I think it's more like "[tällä kohdin] [tien pinta]": "[at this spot of] [the road's surface]". Like "this spot's road's-surface". And I also have *no idea* how I would have *ever* figured out that this is a *plural* and the basic form of the word is actually "kohta" instead of "kohti" (admittedly "kohti" doesn't make much sense, but I didn't have any other ideas!), except by plugging it into finnish-postag…

$ ./finnish-postag <<< "tällä kohdin tien"
tällä   tämä    [POS=PRONOUN]|[SUBCAT=DEMONSTRATIVE]|[NUM=SG]|[CASE=ADE]
kohdin  kohta   [POS=NOUN]|[NUM=PL]|[CASE=INS]
tien    tie     [POS=NOUN]|[NUM=SG]|[CASE=GEN]

…staring at the [NUM=PL] output in confusion, and finally going to Wiktionary and seeing this usage note:

kohta in the sense “spot, location” is occasionally used in the partitive case (in the singular) or the instructive case (in the plural) when used with attributes inflected in some other case, when used in a static sense, e.g. samassa kohtaa (“in the same spot”), (the next two with e.g. rikki (“broken”)) kahdesta kohtaa (“in two spots”), useista kohdin (“in multiple spots”).

I think what "tällä kohdin tien pinta oli kurja" actually means is "here the road's surface was wretched in spots" or "the road's surface was wretched in spots here". The singular "tällä" with plural "kohdin" is still tripping me up; I'm not sure what's modifying what. But I have a general sense of what's being described (the road freaking sucks to drive on), so I'll leave it alone now.

Anyway. Once again over 20 new words on a single page, but a ton of these words are related to treacherous landscapes or to vehicles, which are both very common all throughout these books, so I don't think it's wasted effort, even if some are a bit obscure. I can already feel the "most authors have a pretty specific vocabulary of favorite words that they use a lot" effect kicking in: "tuijottaa" and "viilettää" have already cropped up multiple times.

new words

Relatively uncategorizable: "terve menoa" (also "tervemenoa"—both ways are fine, according to Nykyajan kielenopas's huge list of which phrases should or shouldn't be written with a space and which ones it doesn't matter for) means "good riddance".

nouns

• mutka: a curve, a bend. I have no idea why this wasn't obvious to me after literally JUST learning "mutkainen".
• kohta: spot (as in location), sometimes used in the plural *instructive* case (see above).
• mäki(*): hillside (synonym of "rinne") but also hill (but specifically a large hill). Wiktionary says it's "generally larger than kukkula (“hill, hillock”) and smaller than vuori (“mountain”)". At this point I stopped to consider going back to studying Lojban instead so I wouldn't have to deal with the proliferation of subtly different nouns that exist in natural languages.
• pärinä: the roll of a drum. Used figuratively here to refer to the sound of motorcycle engines. Not to be confused with the much more commonly encountered "päärynä", which means "pear".
• ulvonta: a howl(ing)
• heppu: a person, bloke, dude. Colloquial. Possibly antiquated; I have no idea one way or the other.

verbs

• työntyä(*): to push oneself, to penetrate. Intransitive. Bayport is described thus: "…joka sijaitsi melkein viiden kilometrin päässä Atlantin valtamerestä sisääntyöntyvän Barmet lahden rannalla." I *think* the way to translate this and keep "sisääntyöntävä" is something like "…which was located almost five kilometers in from the Atlantic, on the shore of Barmet Bay, which extended inwards from the ocean", but no one would ever write it like that; it's literally more like "on the shore of the inwards-pushing Barmet Bay", but that's another thing that no one would ever write, because of course it extends inwards, it's a bay! I have no idea why that word is there.
• reunustaa(*): to border, to be along the edge of
• kaartaa: to circle to go around (transitive); to curve/bend/turn (intransitive, of a river or a road etc.)
• täristä(*): to shake (intransitive). I remember from a different book that Finnish has a nearly limitless supply of words starting with "tär-" that describe various kinds of jerky/shaky movement; I'm not going to try to learn them all as an intermediate-level student.

"Kunhan pääsemme mäen huipulle ei ole enää niin rankkaa," Frank huomautti heidän täristessään yli epätasaisen pinnan.

• väistää: to give way, to yield (when driving)
• syöksyä: to plunge, charge, rush

adjectives

• vauras: well-to-do, wealthy
• kapea(*): narrow. I've tried to learn this one a dozen times and I still can never remember whether it means "narrow" or "wide".
• jyrkkä: steep, abrupt, extreme (either concrete or abstract; a steep hill or an extreme political opinion can both be described with this word)
• kurja: miserable, abysmal, wretched
• rankka: burdensome, difficult
• valtava: huge, gigantic. Not to be confused with Vltava, a river in Czechia that also gives its name to a famous symphonic poem by Bedřich Smetana. (Okay, sorry, now I'm just fucking around because it's fun.) What's interesting is that it's used with "vauhti", which means speed or pace: "pojat kuulivat takaapäin valtavalla vauhdilla lähestyvän auton moottorin ulvonnan", "the boys heard from behind the howl of a car's engine approaching at enormous speed". I… would not personally ever use a word like this to describe a *speed*, because a speed has no physical size! I have no idea whether this is a stylistic difference between me and the author, or whether the definition on Wiktionary just doesn't capture the essence of the meaning. My physical dictionary also offers the translation "immense", which is less baffling to me in this context but only slightly.

adverbs

• taitavasti: skillfully. Probably should have been decipherable from knowing "taide"/"taitaa".
• tarpeessa(*): in need. A road is described as "korjauksen tarpeessa", "in need of repair". I'm not sure why this is listed separately as an adverb in the dictionary when it's obvious what it means just from noticing that it's "tarve" + "-ssa".
• takaapäin: from behind.
• suinkin: by all means; "kuin suinkin" -> "as possible" (i.e., to the maximum degree). NB it's one half of a polarity pair: its negative counterpart "suinkaan" seems very very useful, e.g. "se ei suinkaan ollut huono ajatus" ("it wasn't a bad idea at all").

Hardyt pysähtivät heti ja vetäytyivät niin lähelle tien reunaa kuin he suinkin uskalsivat.

• jälleen(*): again, once more