The daiin

[geoffreycaveney]

Well, I can try to give you some details but please bear with me, me and the Finnish grammar are very very far friends,and I sincerely do not remember that much of it. But let's give it a try. Always happy to help anyone who studies Finnish and Uralic languages".
My common man explanation is this:

Root noun is "Ajatus" -> "a thought"
Accusative of "Ajatus" is "Ajatuksen", and also "ajatus"
Genetive of "Ajatus" is also "Ajatuksen"

"Ajatuksen"(Acc) "Ajatuksen" (Gen) "Ajatus" (Acc)

Noun is "Ajattelu"
Genetive is "Ajattelun"
Accusative is "Ajattelun" and "Ajattelu"

"Ajattelun (acc) ajattelun (gen) ajattelu (acc)"

So it is practically kind of a game of genetive + accusative I guess.

A more common way to say that would be "Ajattelen miten ajattelua ajatellaan", but I would not have the same "feeling"

Kiitos paljon! The last sentence I understand as something along the lines of "I am thinking of how the thought is being thought."

The other constructions are more complicated because the "accusative case" in Finnish is a beast. In reality we are talking about the direct object of a verb, and it may take several different endings depending on what seem like rather complex rules to the learner. I found this interesting web page with a "flow chart" of all the rules to check to choose the correct ending for a direct object in Finnish:

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So with that in mind, the first accusative word in each of your examples is the case at the very end of the flow chart, with none of the exceptional rules applying, so it is identical to the genitive case. The final accusative word in each of your examples falls under one of the "object is in nominative" rules in the flow chart.

I would be curious to know, can you give the entire sentences from which these phrases are taken? In particular, what was the verb that the first "ajatuksen" and "ajattelun" are direct objects of? Or are these intended to be completely independent sentences on their own? If so, I might rather interpret both of the first two words of each example as genitive case forms, since I know that Finnish and Uralic languages love to string together sequences of consecutive genitive forms in noun phrases.

I might try to translate your phrases as "the thought of a thought's being thought", which is actually quite an interesting English phrase in its own right.