kiertäessään

Kiertäessään is a Finnish grammatical form derived from kiertää, used as a present adverbial participle to express concurrent action. It conveys that the action of circling, going around, or touring occurs at the same time as the action of the main clause, and the subject of both actions is the same person or thing referred to in the main clause. In translation, kiertäessään roughly corresponds to the English "while circling" or "as (someone) goes around."

In usage, kiertäessään functions like a background or circumstantial clause in narrative and formal prose. It enables efficient sentence construction by avoiding an explicit subject repetition or a separate subordinate clause. The form is most common with third-person subjects and is typically found in written Finnish, though it also appears in literary speech. If the intended subject is not the same as the main clause’s subject, a different syntactic construction is usually required.

Examples:

- Hän kiertäessään kaupungin näki monia nähtävyyksiä. (As he was going around the city, he saw many sights.)

- Kiertäessään kahvilaa hän tapasi vanhan ystävän. (While circling the café, he met an old friend.)

Notes:

- The form is part of the broader system of Finnish adverbial participles, which allow temporally and causally related information to be packed into a single sentence.

- While powerful, kiertäessään can sound formal or literary; in everyday speech, speakers often use explicit conjunctions or finite clauses to convey the same relationships.