Finnish declension
Ok, that is an argument that does make some sense to me at least. The fact that the nominative of a noun becomes the accusative of a pronoun shows that there is a functional connection between the two.
But then, if we include them both under "accusative" then people may think that they're equivalent and interchangeable. We do the same with alternative genitive and partitive plural forms, after all. So I propose changing the table a bit, so that the "accusative" line becomes two rows high, and have two sub-rows each showing the two possible types of accusative. What should we call those sub-rows? Is the imperative the only case where the second accusative (the one like the nominative) is used, or are there others?
Yes, nominative-accusative is used with total objective (partial objective is always in partitive) in all positive passive forms:
- ostetaan auto
- on ostettu auto
- ostettiin auto
- oli ostettu auto
- ostettaisiin auto
- olisi ostettu auto
- ostettakoon auto
- olkoon ostettu auto
- ostettaneen auto
- lienee auto
In addition 3rd infinitive instructive both in active and passive, agent participle and negative participle require nominative accusative. Imperative takes genitive accusative in third person.
This is really too long to explain in the template. I think they should be called "nominative-accusative" and "genitive-accusative" which are direct translations of the Finnish grammatical terms nominatiiviakkusatiivi and genetiiviakkusatiivi. The accusative used to occupy two rows before, so that is no problem. Actually, the accusative box could be three rows high:
- first row: text accusative on left column, 2nd and 3rd empty
- 2nd row: text nom. aligned to the right on left column, {{{nom_sg}}} | {{{nom_pl}}} on 2nd|3rd
- 3rd row: text gen. aligned to the right on left column, {{{gen_sg}}} on 2nd, 3rd empty
How's that?
Is that really an object? As far as I know, the whole idea of a passive is to make the "undergoer" the subject. Like in English they were welcomed.
Finnish does not have passive in exactly tha same sense as in English. Quote from Wikipedia article Finnish language: "The passive voice (sometimes called impersonal or indefinite) resembles a "fourth person" similar to, e.g., English "people say/do/". Your example "They were welcomed" is "Heidät toivotettiin tervetulleeksi", i.e. it really has an object, grammatically speaking.