Sufssidega

Sufssidega is an Estonian grammatical term meaning “with suffixes,” used in linguistic descriptions to refer to words that carry more than one suffix attached to a base. In Estonian, suffixation is a central mechanism for signaling grammatical relations, and sufssidega describes forms where several suffixes function together to convey information such as case, number, possession, and other categories within a single word.

Suffix stacking is common in Estonian morphology. For example, a noun can acquire multiple suffixes in a sequence to express different grammatical meanings simultaneously. The word laps (child) in the genitive plural is laste, and adding the comitative suffix -ga yields lastega, meaning “with the children.” Likewise, õpilastega means “with the students.” These examples illustrate how a base can be extended by several suffixes to form a single word that carries complex grammatical information, a phenomenon referred to by sufssidega.

In linguistic analysis and language pedagogy, the concept of sufssidega helps describe how Estonian words encode structure through affixal morphemes rather than standalone function words. Tags and parsing in corpora often break down such forms into their morphemes (stem plus successive suffixes) to reflect their grammatical composition. Understanding sufssidega is thus useful for studying Estonian morphology, morphology-aware search, and teaching about case, number, and possession in the language.

See also: Estonian grammar, sufiks (suffix), comitative, morphological analysis.