Hello. May I ask, what's the difference between "tai" and "vai"? I tend to only use "tai", cause "vai"sounds a bit too much like a sound of distress, like "oi vei", but I know I'm wrong. Kiitos!
Thanks for the question! It always makes me happy to get them, so ask away whenever.
This is a really good question. My grammar books and the internet version of Finnish grammar only offer that both vai and tai are conjuctions, and disjunctive ones at that. They are used much in the same way as English or.
They are almost the same, as all my grammars list them together, but they are still not totally interchangeable. I’m going out on my own intuition on this one, because it was hard to find anything useful to back this up after a quick research. How I see it, vai is used as a question.
Haluatko tätä vai sitä? is better than Haluatko tätä tai sitä? (both of these translate to do you want this or that). Actually the latter one sounds somehow wrong, at least to me. Also, in En osaa päättää laitanko mekon vai housut (I can’t decide if I should put on a skirt or trousers), vai is used when the subordinate clause is a question even when the whole sentence is not.
Vai can also be used, more often in spoken Finnish, to make something into a question: Tämä on hyvä vai? (something along the lines of This is good, then?) It can also imply disbelief, when used like this.
You can add vai in front of some question words, too, like vai mitä? when asking for agreement in something. Se oli hyvä leffa, vai mitä? (It was a good movie, right?)
Tai, then again, is used (for example) in places where one lists options: Voit ottaa mukaasi lelun tai pelin. (You can take with you either a toy or a game.) In these, you can’t use vai.
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