virheestään

Virheestään is a Finnish grammatical form used to refer to a third person’s fault or mistake, meaning roughly “of his/her/its mistake” or “about his/her/its mistake.” The form is built from virhe (mistake) in the elative case (-stä) combined with the third-person possessive suffix (-nsä/-sä), yielding the fused form virheestään. The ending shows both the reference to the mistake and ownership by the third person.

Usage and meaning

Virheestään is typically used when speaking about someone else’s mistake, especially in contexts of reporting, recounting, or reflecting on an error. It often follows verbs such as kertoa (to tell), puhua (to talk about), or myöntää (to admit). Examples:

- Hän kertoi virheestään. (He talked about his mistake.)

- Hän myönsi virheestään lopuksi. (He admitted his mistake in the end.)

Related forms

Finnish possessive forms combine with nouns in systematic ways. For virhe, the basic possessive variants include:

- virheeni (my mistake)

- virheesi (your mistake)

- virheensä (his/her/its mistake)

Virheestään is the form when the phrase expresses “from/about his/her/its mistake,” with the elative meaning and the 3rd-person possessive suffix integrated.

Notes

- The elative suffix -stä/-stä indicates “from” or “about,” and the 3rd-person possessive suffix marks ownership. The combination in virheestään is a common pattern in Finnish for referring to someone’s fault within a narrative or discourse.

- Other persons’ forms follow the standard pattern, e.g., virheeni, virheesi, virheensä, virheestämme, virheenne, virheensä, depending on the possessor and number.