Kauniista

Kauniista is the elative singular form of the Finnish adjective kaunis, meaning beautiful. In Finnish, adjectives decline to agree with the nouns they modify in case and number, so kaunis has several inflected forms such as kauniin (genitive), kaunista (partitive), kauniissa (inessive), and kauniista (elative). Kauniista is therefore not a standalone dictionary entry but a specific inflection used with nouns that are in the elative case.

The elative case expresses origin, source, or movement away from something (among other uses). When kaunis modifies a noun in this context, the adjective takes the elative ending kauniista to match the noun phrase. For example, in a sentence describing material or origin: Talo on rakennettu kauniista puusta, meaning “The house is built from beautiful wood.” Here both puusta (wood in elative) and kauniista (beautiful in elative) agree with the noun they describe.

Another example shows spatial movement from a location: Kävin kauniista puistosta kotiin, meaning “I walked from the beautiful park to home.” In this case, puistosta is the elative form of puisto (park), and kauniista modifies it accordingly.

Kauniista, like other inflected forms of kaunis, illustrates how Finnish adjectives encode case information to align with the noun phrase. It is commonly encountered in descriptive writings and translations that involve origin or movement from something described as beautiful.

See also: Finnish grammar, adjectives in Finnish, noun-adjective agreement, Finnish cases.