Milliseks

Milliseks is a term occasionally used in discussions of Estonian grammar to refer to a translative usage that expresses transformation into a new state or role. The concept is not an official grammatical category in standard Estonian grammar, but it appears in language-learning materials and descriptive accounts as a convenient label for the form that answers questions such as “into what?” or “as what?” when a change of state is involved. In Estonian, the translative case, marked by the suffix -ks, denotes such changes, for example when something becomes something else. Milliseks is thus described in pedagogical contexts as a way to illustrate how Estonian encodes state change morphologically and lexically.

The term is primarily found in educational contexts rather than in formal grammars, and its usage varies by author. Some linguists argue that milliseks helps learners distinguish between static predicates and those describing developmental or transformative processes. Others view it as a convenience label that could be confused with established terminology, so many sources avoid it in formal descriptions.

See also: Estonian language, Estonian translative case, grammatical case, state change.

References: general resources on Estonian grammar and language-learning texts that discuss translative constructions.