Lentäviä

Lentäviä is a grammatical form in Finnish. It is the partitive plural form of the present active participle lentävä, which is derived from the verb lentää, meaning to fly. As a participle used as an adjective, lentävä describes something that is flying or capable of flight, and lentäviä is its plural partitive form, used when the noun it describes is in the partitive case or when the action is viewed in an indefinite or continuous sense.

In usage, lentäviä functions like an ordinary adjective that agrees with the noun it modifies in number and case. It commonly appears in noun phrases such as lentäviä lintuja (flying birds) or lentäviä hyönteisiä (flying insects). The partitive form is chosen in contexts where the quantity is indefinite, partial, or described in a negative sense, or when the object of a sentence is in the partitive case.

The form exists alongside other related forms of the same participle, including lentävä (singular nominative) and lentävät (plural indicative). Finnish adaptively uses these participial forms to express ongoing action or a characteristic feature, much like English “flying” in various noun phrases, but with Finnish case and number agreement.

Examples:

- Taivaalla nähtiin lentäviä lintuja. (Flying birds were seen in the sky.)

- Tutkimuksessa kerättiin lentäviä hyönteisiä. (Flying insects were collected for study.)

Lentäviä functions mainly as a descriptor within noun phrases and is a typical example of how Finnish uses participles to convey action and characteristic state in a concise, adjectival form.