asuntoaan

Asuntoaan is a Finnish noun phrase formed from the word asunto, meaning dwelling or home, combined with a third-person possessive suffix. It is used to express ownership of a home by someone other than the speaker or listener. In practice, asuntoaan translates roughly to “his/her own home” in English, and it appears in sentences where the home is the object of the action.

Meaning and usage

Asunto refers to a dwelling, apartment, or house. When a speaker wants to indicate ownership by a third person, the possessive suffix is attached to the noun, resulting in forms such as asuntoaan. The exact form can vary with the surrounding grammatical structure and case, but the core idea is possession by a third person. The phrase is common in everyday Finnish as well as in written text.

Examples

- Hän maalaa asuntoaan. (He/she is painting his/her home.)

- Hän huolehtii asuntoaan päivittäin. (He/she takes care of his/her home daily.)

Grammar notes

Finnish expresses possession by attaching a possessive suffix to the noun, with the suffix changing to reflect the possessor. Asuntoaan is a concrete example of this pattern when the third-person singular possessor is intended. The surrounding sentence often determines the exact case or particle use, but asuntoaan is recognizable as a possessive construction referring to “his/her home.”

Relation to related terms

The basic noun is asunto (home/dwelling). Other related forms include asuntoa (partitive), asuntoon (illative), or asuntossaan/asuntossaan (his/her own home with alternative possessive variants). The choice among these forms depends on the syntactic role and meaning in the sentence.

See also

Finnish language, Finnish possessive suffixes, Finnish cases.