eriävän

Eriävän is a Finnish grammatical form that appears most commonly as the genitive singular of the adjective eriävä. The base adjective eriävä conveys the sense of being different, distinct, or separate from others. In Finnish, adjectives inflect to agree with the noun they modify in case and number, so eriävä takes forms such as eriävän before a noun in genitive.

Usage and meaning

In contemporary Finnish, eriävä is relatively formal and is used in contexts where contrast or differentiation is emphasized, such as technical, legal, or academic language. In everyday speech, the more common synonym is erilainen, which also means “different.” The genitive singular eriävän is used to link to a following noun in the genitive case, as in phrases like eriävän talon hinta (“the price of a different/different kind of house”) or eriävän työn vaatimat resurssit (“the resources required by a different kind of work”).

Morphology

Eriävä follows the standard Finnish adjective paradigm; its genitive singular form is eriävän. Other inflected forms (nominative, partitive, plural, etc.) would adapt to match the noun they describe, but eriävän is specifically the genitive singular form. The word can function attributively before a genitive noun or as part of a larger noun phrase.

Relation to other terms

The adjective eriävä is related in meaning to erilainen, poikkeava, and erillinen, which express various senses of difference, deviation, or separation. Eriävä is less common in everyday language and is more often encountered in formal or specialized texts.

See also: erilainen, poikkeava, erillinen.