Hyvät

Hyvät is the plural nominative form of the Finnish adjective hyvä, meaning “good.” Finnish adjectives decline to agree with the nouns they modify in number and case, so hyvät is used when describing plural nouns in the nominative or when the predicate refers to a plural subject. For example: hyvät ystävät (good friends), hyvät tulokset (good results).

In other cases, the adjective takes different forms. The partitive plural is hyviä (e.g., hyviä ihmisiä, good people), and the genitive plural is hyvien (e.g., hyvien ystävien, of good friends). The forms reflect Finnish rich adjective inflection and its harmony with the noun’s case.

Hyvät can also function in predicative position after the copula olla (to be). With a plural subject, the predicate adjective remains in the nominative plural: Nämä ovat hyvät (These are good) or He ovat hyvät ystävät (They are good friends).

Cultural and linguistic notes: hyvät appears in Finnish idioms and titles. A notable example is the Finnish title for the Western film The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, which is Hyvät, pahat ja rumat. In normal prose, hyvät is lowercase unless it begins a sentence or appears as part of a quoted title. Aside from its grammatical uses, Hyvät is not commonly a standalone proper noun in standard Finnish, though capitalization may occur in titles or at sentence starts.

In summary, hyvät is a core inflected form of the common Finnish word meaning “good,” used to describe plural nouns or to serve as a plural predicate adjective in sentences.