52 Åke Viberg
In Finnish, the Source is marked with a case indicating direction from (ablative
‘from’ or elative ‘out of ’ as in huonee-sta room-elat). As could be observed in
(23), lähteä like English leave can be used without explicitly indicating the Source,
but that is not possible with Swedish lämna. There are a few examples where an
explicit Source is added as an object in the Swedish translation as in (25).
(25) Kun äiti joskus lähtee, [lit. When mother once leaves]
Den dag hon lämnar huset, [lit. The day she leaves the house]
In (26), lähteä has an explicit Goal complement (Saksa-an Germany-Illative ‘into’)
but is still Source-oriented like its Swedish and English translations, åka and go.
(26) Olisiko se paha, jos läht-isi-n Saksa-an töihin?
if leave-cond-1sg Germany-ill
Skulle det vara dumt om jag åkte till Tyskland för att arbeta?
Would it be wrong to go to Germany to work?
Rather frequently, lähteä is combined with another verb in the so-called third
infinitive (-ma/-mä) inflected in the illative case (ill). The illative form in com-
bination with the third infinitive is used after verbs of movement to indicate that
an action is about to begin (Karlsson 2008, Chapter 17.4.4). One rather frequent
Swedish translation of lähteä in this construction is the inceptive aspectual verb
börja ‘begin’ which is combined with a bare infinitive of the main verb gå ‘go/walk’
in Example (27):
(27) He läht-i-vät kävele-mä-än ääneti.
they leave-past-3pl walk-3rd inf-ill silent
They left together on foot, silent.
De började gå utan ett ord.
The Finnish vehicle verb ajaa, which semantically closely resembles German
fahren and covers both åka and köra, often appears as the second verb in this con-
struction (lähteä aja-ma-an Vst-3rd Infinitive-Illative) and lähteä is then reflected
in various ways in the Swedish translations. There are 24 occurrences of lähteä
ajamaan in the corpus. In five cases, the translation is åka iväg, where lähteä is
semantically reflected in the particle iväg ‘away’:
(28) Menimme autoon ja lähd-i-mme aja-ma-an.
leave-past-1pl drive-3rd inf-ill
Vi steg in i bilen och åkte iväg.
We got into the car and drove off. (My transl.)