MEANING:
Noun: sort, quality.
Laatu appears in our example in the elative singular, laadusta.
In the elative case, a word normally takes the basic meaning of ”out of” or ”from,” as in ”Olen Amerikasta kotoisin” (”I come from America.”) However, in our example, the laadusta in the elative takes on the meaning of ”about quality.” In our phrase, which is a fragment of a sentence without a verb, a verb like sanoa is implied. With verbs like sanoa (”to say” or ”to tell”) or puhua (”to talk”) the person, place or thing that gets the indirect action (gets talked about) is in the elative case.
Here is a list of words that require the elative.
EXTRA CREDIT:
Let’s translate the entire bus stop advertisement, ”Pari sanaa laadusta: DNA ja iPhone,” or ”A couple of words about quality: DNA and iPhone.”
Pari is a noun that means ”couple,” ”pair” or ”few.” Here it translates into English as ”a couple of” or ”a couple” and modifies the following word, sanaa.
Sanaa means ”words.” It is the partitive singular of sana, meaning ”word.” Remember that partitive singular is used when you are talking about ”some” or ”a few.”
DNA ja iPhone refers to the pairing of DNA (Finnish cell phone company) and the iPhone.
Finnish Word of the Day 