maitonsa

Maitonsa is a Finnish word-formation form meaning “his/her milk.” It is created by attaching the third-person possessive suffix to the noun mait(o) “milk,” yielding maitonsa. This is a grammatical construction used to indicate ownership of the noun by a third person, rather than a standalone lexical item.

Morphology and variation: Finnish expresses possession on the possessed noun with suffixes rather than separate possessive pronouns. The third-person suffix appears as -nsa or -nsä, with the choice determined by vowel harmony. In maitonsa, the stem mait(o) ends with a back vowel, so the back-vowel variant -nsa is used, producing maitonsa. Stems with front vowels would typically take -nsä. The suffix is integrated into the noun and behaves like other inflected forms in Finnish grammar.

Usage: Maitonsa is used in contexts where a speaker refers to someone else’s milk. For example: Maitonsa on kylmää. (Her milk is cold.) and Hän toi maitonsa pois keittiöstä. (She brought her milk away from the kitchen.) The form can appear in various syntactic positions like other Finnish nouns, and it does not require an explicit separate possessive pronoun to indicate the owner.

Notes: Maitonsa illustrates Finnish possessive morphology, where possessive meaning is encoded directly on the possessed noun. While it is common in everyday language to omit the possessor when context makes it clear, maitonsa explicitly marks third-person ownership within the noun itself. See also Finnish grammar, possessive suffixes, and noun inflection in Finnish.