Finnish to Irish: feeling cold is not an object the speaker owns
Finnish uses an adessive person in a bodily-feeling expression
A Taste of Finnish gives Minulla on kylmä, I feel cold. Its lesson groups bodily feelings expressed with the person in an -lla or -llä form followed by olla and the feeling expression. The sentence does not identify a cold object owned by the speaker, even though ordinary possession uses a superficially related structure.
This is useful when someone requests a warmer seat or a hot drink. The source reports their sensation. An Irish translation about owning something cold would leave that experience unexpressed, while a statement only about the room’s temperature could omit whose discomfort prompted the request.
Irish can express the feeling through ar rather than possession ag
Ó Dónaill’s dictionary gives fuacht a bheith ort for feeling cold. The entry for ar lists inflected personal forms including orm and ort and documents constructions for feelings and afflictions. The relevant person can therefore appear inside the prepositional expression rather than as a separately translated Finnish subject.
The directional comparison is not a mechanical Finnish -lla equals Irish ar rule. Both grammatical resources describe complete constructions. A Finnish expression of having an item and the cold-feeling expression may share visible material while requiring different Irish relationships. Determine whether the source names a possession or an experience before choosing the preposition.
Nor does the on-like spatial gloss of ar require an imagined physical object lying on the speaker. In the cited feeling construction, the preposition relates the sensation to the experiencer. Translating its components through a literal picture of something resting on a person would misrepresent the ordinary expression.
Feeling cold and catching a chill are not interchangeable events
The Irish fuacht entry distinguishes feeling the cold from catching a chill through different constructions. Thus the same lexical family can participate in an immediate sensation or an event of becoming affected. A translation of the Finnish feeling sentence should not automatically report that the speaker has caught an illness or undergone an earlier event.
The Finnish lesson also illustrates a question asking whether another person is feeling hot. Orm identifies the speaker; ort identifies the listener in the dictionary’s personal paradigm. Identifying that experiencer matters: a query about someone else’s comfort is different from the speaker reporting their own cold sensation. The Irish personal prepositional form should follow the person actually concerned rather than default to first person in every familiar formula.
For Finnish into Irish, read the bodily-feeling expression as a whole and preserve the experiencer, sensation and time relationship. Choose the target feeling construction instead of treating every Finnish adessive-person phrase as ownership. This keeps a request motivated by feeling cold distinct from a claim about a cold possession, the ambient weather or catching a chill, while allowing Irish to encode the person through its own prepositional forms.
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