Päätteisiä

Päätteisiä is a Finnish grammatical term referring to inflectional suffixes. These suffixes are added to the end of words to indicate grammatical information such as case, number, tense, and person. Unlike derivational suffixes, which can change the meaning or word class of a word, inflectional suffixes do not alter the fundamental meaning of the base word but rather its grammatical function within a sentence.

In Finnish, a highly inflected language, päätteisiä play a crucial role in sentence construction. For example, the noun "talo" (house) can take various päätteisiä to indicate different cases: "talossa" (in the house), "talosta" (from the house), "taloon" (into the house). Similarly, verbs are heavily inflected with päätteisiä to show person and number, such as "luen" (I read), "luet" (you read), "lukee" (he/she/it reads). The rich system of päätteisiä allows Finnish to express complex grammatical relationships without relying heavily on prepositions or auxiliary verbs, which are common in many other languages. Understanding these suffixes is essential for comprehending and speaking Finnish correctly.