Pealdisi

Pealdisi is the Estonian term for suffixes, i.e., bound morphemes attached to a word stem to form new words or to express grammatical information. In Estonian, pealdisi are a central part of morphology and are used in both word formation and inflection. They can be derivational, creating new lexical items or changing the part of speech, or inflectional, signaling grammatical categories such as case, number, tense, or mood.

Derivational suffixes expand or shift meaning. Examples include mine, which nominalizes verbs (lugema → lugemine, 'reading'); -ja, which forms agent nouns from verbs or stems (õppima → õppija, 'student'); and -lik, which can produce adjectives with a sense of "like" or "characteristic" (ilus → iluslik, 'illusory').

Inflectional suffixes indicate grammatical function and are responsible for much of Estonian agreement and plurality in nouns as well as tense, person, and mood in verbs. These suffixes attach to the stem and may stack in sequences to express complex meaning.

The system of pealdisi reflects Estonian’s highly suffixing, agglutinative morphology, allowing rich word formation and precise grammatical marking within relatively long word forms. Understanding pealdisi is essential to analysing Estonian syntax and lexicon, as much of meaning is carried by the combination of stems and their suffixes.

See also: Estonian grammar, morphology, derivation, inflection.