illepääte

Illlepääte, or suffix, is a morpheme that attaches to the end of a word stem to express grammatical function or to form a new word. In Finnish, illipääte is a central part of the language’s highly inflected and agglutinative morphology, allowing speakers to convey case, number, mood, tense, voice, or derivational meaning through endings.

Suffixes can be inflectional, modifying a word’s grammatical category without changing its core meaning, or derivational, creating new words or changing the part of speech. Inflectional endings often indicate grammatical relations, such as case or location, while derivational endings can turn a noun into an adjective or a verb into a noun.

Finnish suffixes are numerous and can be stacked in sequences on a single stem. The choice of suffix is influenced by factors such as vowel harmony and consonant gradation, which shape which endings are phonologically compatible with a given stem. This leads to variations like talossa (in the house) where the inessive suffix -ssa/-ssä follows the stem’s phonological rules, or kissan (cat’s) formed with the genitive suffix -n.

Common illustrative examples include:

- kissan from kissa + -n (genitive: the cat’s)

- talossa from talo + -ssa (inessive: in the house)

- kukainen from kukka + -inen (derivational: flower-like)

Illlepääte thus encompasses a broad set of endings that enable Finnish to express a wide range of grammatical and lexical relationships through relatively compact word forms. Understanding suffixes is essential to analyzing Finnish word structure and meaning.

---