Ikäistä

Ikäistä is the partitive singular form of the Finnish adjective ikäinen, which means aged or old. It is used when the noun that ikäinen modifies is in the partitive case or in contexts where the object is indefinite or partitive, such as after negation or with certain verbs that require a partitive object. For example, in a sentence like “En nähnyt ikäistä miestä,” the noun mies is in the partitive and ikäistä is the corresponding partitive form of the adjective.

In Finnish, ikäinen declines like other adjectives. The basic forms include nominative singular ikäinen, genitive singular ikäisen, partitive singular ikäistä, nominative plural ikäiset, and partitive plural ikisiä. Illative and other derived cases follow standard adjective inflection patterns, e.g., ikäiseen, ikäisiin, ikäisissä, and so on.

Semantics and usage: ikäinen describes someone or something that has age and is not new. For people, it emphasizes age; for objects it is less common in everyday speech. In standard or everyday Finnish, vanha is often preferred for both people and things when meaning “old” is intended. Ikäinen tends to appear in more formal, descriptive, or clinical registers, or in linguistic discussions about Finnish grammar itself.

Etymology and related terms: ikäinen is formed from the noun ikä, meaning age, with the adjectival suffix -inen. Related words include ikäihminen (older person), ikääntyminen (aging), and ikäluokka (age group).

Summary: ikäistä is a grammatical inflection used to describe age in the partitive context, reflecting Finnish’s rich system of adjective agreement and case marking.