Katkestaks

Katkestaks is an Estonian verb form used to express hypothetical action in the third-person singular conditional mood of the verb katkestama, meaning "to interrupt" or "to discontinue." The conditional mood in Estonian is used to talk about what would happen under certain circumstances, often in clauses beginning with kui (if). As a standalone word, katkestaks normally appears only as part of a larger sentence such as: Kui ta katkestaks ettekande, tekiks segadus. Here, the subject ta (he) is often explicit, but the form already encodes the conditional meaning.

In use, katkestaks denotes interrupting a continuing action or event; it can refer to interrupting a speech, a process, a connection, or an activity. The nuance is potentiality rather than certainty. In more everyday language, speakers might use other expressions to convey the same idea, depending on formality.

The term can be confused with related nouns such as katkestus (interruption, outage) or katkestused (interruptions). Katkestaks is not a separate lexical item beyond the verb form; it is a grammatical inflection.