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:
“Governments can err, Presidents do make mistakes, but the immortal Dante tells us that divine justice weighs the sins of the cold-blooded and the sins of the warm-hearted in different scales. Better the occasional faults of a Government that lives in a spirit of charity than the constant omission of a Government frozen in the ice of its own indifference.”
—Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882–1945)
“Again, the great number of cultivated men keep each other up to a high standard. The habit of meeting well-read and knowing men teaches the art of omission and selection.”
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“In a country where misery and want were the foundation of the social structure, famine was periodic, death from starvation common, disease pervasive, thievery normal, and graft and corruption taken for granted, the elimination of these conditions in Communist China is so striking that negative aspects of the new rule fade in relative importance.”
—Barbara Tuchman (1912–1989)
“The word is the Verb, and the Verb is God.”
—Victor Hugo (1802–1885)