Taskuunsa

Taskuunsa is a Finnish grammatical form meaning “into his/her pocket.” It combines the illative case, which marks direction into a place, with a third-person possessive suffix to indicate ownership. The noun tasku (pocket) takes the illative ending and then receives the possessive suffix, producing a single word that encodes both movement into a pocket and the pocket’s owner.

Formation and meaning: The illative suffix signals direction into a location (for example, into the pocket), and the third-person possessive suffix attaches to that form to specify whose pocket is being referenced. The result is a fused word that can carry both spatial and possessive information in a compact grammatical package. This construction illustrates Finnish’s agglutinative nature, where multiple suffixes stack on a base noun to convey detailed meaning.

Usage: Taskuunsa is used in sentences describing actions involving entering or placing something into someone’s pocket, or looking into that pocket. Example: Hän laittoi avaimet taskuunsa. (He put the keys into his pocket.) Another example: Hän kurkisti taskuunsa ja löysi rahat. (He peered into his pocket and found the money.) The form is most common with singular third-person references; forms for other possessives follow the same pattern with the appropriate suffixes.

Related forms: Finnish allows analogous constructions for other possessive persons, by attaching the corresponding possessive suffixes to the illative form of tasku. Taskuunsa thus serves as a clear example of how Finnish combines direction and possession within a single word.