Päähänsä
Päähänsä is a Finnish inflected form built from the noun pää (head). It combines the illative case form päähän, meaning into or onto the head, with the third-person possessive suffix, yielding päähänsä. The resulting form is a bound morpheme used to indicate both direction toward a person’s head and possession by that person. In practice it is most often understood as “to/into one’s head” or, figuratively, “into one’s mind.”
- The base is pää (head). The illative ending for many Finnish nouns is -an/-ään, here simplified as
- The exact shape of the possessive ending changes with person and number (and vowel harmony), but
- Päähänsä can denote physical movement or placement: e.g., Hän laittoi kypärän päähänsä. “He put a helmet
- It is also used idiomatically to express mental impact, such as ideas entering someone’s mind or
- The form appears in narratives and descriptive prose where the head is the referent of ownership