elävän

Elävän is the genitive singular form of the Finnish adjective elävä, meaning “living” or “alive.” The base form elävä is derived from the verb elää, “to live,” and functions as a present active participle used as an adjective in Finnish.

In Finnish, adjectives decline for case and number, so elävä takes different forms to agree with the noun it modifies. The genitive singular form elävän is used before a noun in the genitive case, for example elävän ihmisen oikeudet, meaning “the rights of the living person.” Other forms include elävä (nominative singular), elävää (partitive singular), elävät (nominative plural), elävien (genitive plural), and eläviä (partitive plural).

Usage of elävän is common in legal, biographical, and descriptive Finnish to express possession or a relationship to the living. It appears in phrases such as elävän olennon suojelu (“protection of the living being”) or elävän sukukunnan perintö (“heritage of the living generation”). The form itself does not introduce a separate lexical meaning beyond “living,” but it signals a grammatical connection between the noun and its genitive case.

Notes on grammar: elävä behaves like a standard Finnish adjective, with regular agreement across cases and numbers. Learners should be mindful of the genitive singular form elävän when constructing phrases that denote possession or association with something living.