lukemaansa

Lukemaansa is a Finnish grammatical construction used to refer to content that someone has read. It is formed from a nominalized form of the verb lukea (to read) combined with the third-person possessive suffix, yielding a phrase that means roughly “the reading that he/she/it has done” or, more idiomatically, “what he/she/it has read.” In practice, lukemaansa functions as a noun phrase that can modify another noun or act as the object of a sentence, conveying the idea of a reading item rather than the act of reading itself.

The form is part of a broader family of Finnish relative-content constructions that attach a possessive suffix to a nominalized verb stem to indicate the owner of the reading. This allows speakers to compress a relative clause into a single noun phrase. The exact case ending of the following noun (for example lukemaansa kirjaa or lukemaansa artikkelia) depends on the syntactic role of the phrase in the sentence.

Lukemaansa is most commonly encountered in written Finnish and in formal or literary contexts, where precision about what was read is important. In everyday speech, speakers may prefer a full relative clause such as “kirja jonka hän on lukenut” (the book that he has read). The lukemaansa construction thus provides a concise alternative for referring to someone’s reading content while maintaining a neutral, descriptive tone. See also Finnish grammar, participles, and relative clauses.