Lempeää

Lempeää is the partitive singular form of the Finnish adjective lempeä, which means gentle, mild, or lenient. The word describes qualities such as calmness, kindness, or softness in people, actions, or phenomena, and it is closely connected with the noun lempeys, meaning gentleness.

In Finnish grammar, adjectives inflect for case, number, and degree. Lempeä appears in the nominative singular as lempeä and in the partitive singular as lempeää. The partitive form is used with nouns in the partitive case, often for indefinite or non-countable references, after negation, or in certain verbal constructions. For example, lempeää ilmaa means “gentle air,” lempeää puhetta means “gentle talk,” and lempeää sävyä can describe a gentle tone. The adjective can also appear in attributive position before a noun in the nominative, for instance, lempeä valo meaning “gentle light.”

Lempeä has comparative and superlative forms, such as lempeämpi for “more gentle,” and lempeimminkin may occur in more formal or literary usage to indicate the most gentle. In practice, Finnish speakers choose form and case based on the syntactic role of the described noun.

Usage notes: lempeä and lempeää convey a sense of mildness and patience rather than harshness, and they are common in everyday language, literature, and media. The word can describe personality, behavior, weather, light, or tone, among other contexts, always aligning with Finnic language patterns for adjectives in Finnish.