reading log: Tornilinnan aarre, pages 12 to 14

Frank ja Joe palasivat samaa tietä muutaman mailin verran ja kääntyivät sitten maantielle, joka johti pääväylälle, jonka varella Mortonin maatila sijaitsi.

After my earlier bafflement at the localization of some distances from miles to kilometers not only in narration but also in dialogue, Chet is described in the narration as living "noin mailin päässä" (about a mile away), plus the above sentence. I don't even know anymore.

Still plenty of new words on every page, but this was much less exhausting to get through. I was going to do just 12 and 13, but 14 is already the end of the first chapter, so I decided to push through!

new words

nouns

• autonrämä: a jalopy, a car that sucks. Actually it appears as two words here, "auton rämä", and apparently "rämä" is an adjective generally meaning "ramshackle" or "run-down"; but it appears as a compound word in Wiktionary, and that makes a lot more sense to me grammatically anyway.
• maatila(*): farm. Literally "land-place", so kind of obvious from context as a parcel of land in the countryside.
• oja: a ditch/trench
• pensaikko(*): shrubbery/brush/scrub. Collective "-kko" on "pensas" (which I knew).
• penger: embankment

"penger" is a wacky one; words ending in "-r" are quite rare in Finnish. I honestly wouldn't have even guessed that "penger" was admissable in Finnish phonotactics, but here we are. The declension is super weird: Wiktionary says that the basic form "penger" is more common than the alternative form "penkere", but Kielitoimiston sanakirja says that the forms in other cases more commonly use "penkeree-" as the stem (which is derived from the basic form "penkere"). What truly caught me off guard is that the forms of "penger" undergo reverse gradation *while the "-r" stays on the end*, so you get forms like the genitive singular "penkeren" and nominative plural "penkeret", which I swear to god look like straight-up mistakes because they remind me so much of what beginners do with words like "huone". But apparently I don't have to worry about that because… no one uses those forms? They say "penkereen" and "penkereet" and e.g. "penkereeseen" like I would expect? 😂 Of this extraordinarily peculiar word type, Wiktionary says:

These words have dual forms, with and without the final ⟨-e⟩. When the ⟨-e⟩ is present, the declension is as type 48 (hame). Without it, the declension is as type 32 (sisar). One common pattern is to use the forms without ⟨-e⟩ (32) for the nominative and the partitive singulars and the forms with ⟨-e⟩ (48) for all other forms.

So I suppose it tracks that the singular partitive "pengertä" is in use in this book but I can be spared from having to say things like "penkeren vieressä" that would just feel wrong in the way that (a+b)^2 = a^2 + b^2 feels wrong even though it holds in certain rings.

• kuja: alley, but I think it's more generic than English's "alley" is; it can be a path that's narrow for any reason, even if it's lined with low fences or with trees or even with people crowding in, it's not specifically a path that's between two buildings.
• veräjä: gate. I'm accustomed to "portti" for "gate"; based on an image search, I *think* the nuance here is that "veräjä" is specifically the kind of smaller gate that you find in a fence, for example around an animal corral or a garden.
• varas(*): thief. I would know this one if you showed me a flashcard, but I always forget that the stem is "varka-". (From there we also get "varkaus", a theft.)
• aavistus: hunch, premonition, intuition

verbs

• trimmailla: I guess this is loaned from English "to trim", but I can't find it in any dictionary. I assume it means something like "to tinker with", since in context it's "[Chet] trimmaili jokä päivä [auton] moottoria".
• tähystää: to look out for (in the sense of "keeping a lookout", not in the sense of "beware of")
• suunnata: to head (e.g. to go in a direction). Can also be to target or direct, as in e.g. to target something to a particular audience.
• hakata: to beat, to chop, to hit something repeatedly. "Sydän hakaten" -> "with a pounding heart".
• astahtaa: to step
• kiiruhtaa: to hurry (intransitive). Presumably related to "kiire".
• hukata: to misplace, to waste. "Hukkaamme aikaa" -> "we're wasting time".
• järkeillä: to reason
• kehottaa(*): to urge, to encourage. Wiktionary says this is transitive, but I feel like transitivity gets murky when something is used as a dialogue tag. I guess it's as transitive as English's "say" is.

adjectives

• kuoppainen: full of potholes
• pisamainen: freckled
• luja: usually something like "strong/firm/loud", but probably used here in the informal sense of "fast"

adverbs

• katollaan(*): upside-down. Particularly used of vehicles, because it literally means "on its roof". Totally obvious from knowing "kato", because it's so literal, but I've included it because it is apparently considered an adverb in its own right and also because I just think it's hilarious.
• vinossa: askew (used here figuratively). I'm not sure how significant/universal/mandatory this is, but it's used here with "oleva" instead of plain old "olla": "Hardyt tunsivat jonkin olevan vinossa" -> "The Hardys felt that something was wrong". I mean I guess it's just because there's no "että", so there isn't really room for the typical conjugated form of the verb to spread its wings.
• tiessään: gone, absent. (Literally "in the road"…?)
• tusinoittain: by the dozen. Can be literal (of eggs etc.), but presumably used figuratively here: Frank comments that "autovarkailla on aina tusinoittain avaimia mukanaan", "car thieves always have keys with them by the dozen".

adpositions

• pitkin: along. This postposition, shockingly, takes the *partitive* case instead of the genitive: "Minua en huvita ajaa uudestaan tuota kuoppaista tietä pitkin." It's also used four times in less than two pages!
• verran: this one is tough to translate, but it's generally used with amounts (usually indicating some uncertainty/vagueness), so *one* of the things it means is "about/or so/roughly": "palasivat samaa tietä muutaman mailin verran" -> "went back on the same road for a few miles or so".
• varrella: along/alongside/by. "pääväylälle, jonka varrella Mortonin maatila sijaitsi" -> "to the main road, along which the Morton farm was located".
• kohti(*): towards. I've known the definition of this one for ages but I'm taking special note of it today in hopes that I'll finally remember that it's another one of those unusual ones that takes the partitive: "taivasta kohti", etc.

phrases

• kohauttaa olkapäitään(*): to shrug one's shoulders. In Finnish you can't "shrug" intransitively; you *must* "shrug your shoulders" specifically. Absent "olkiaan" or "olkapäitään" (or other appropriately declined possessive partitive plural of something that means "shoulder"), the verb "kohauttaa" means "to cause a murmur", as in when saying something scandalous or frightening in front of an audience.
• olla pulassa(*): to be in trouble