isiksipäätteellä

Isiksipäätteellä is a Finnish term that translates roughly to "ending with a personal pronoun suffix." It refers to a grammatical phenomenon where the possessive suffix attached to a noun also incorporates information about the person and number of the possessor, similar to how personal pronouns function.

In Finnish, nouns can take possessive suffixes to indicate ownership or association. For example, the word "taloni" means "my house," where "-ni" signifies "my." This suffix is directly attached to the noun. The concept of "isiksipäätteellä" emphasizes that these suffixes function as condensed personal pronouns. Instead of saying "talo minun" (house my), Finnish uses the more economical "taloni."

This grammatical feature is present in various forms across Finnish grammar. It applies to first-person singular ("-ni"), second-person singular ("-si"), third-person singular ("-nsa" or "-nsä"), first-person plural ("-mme"), second-person plural ("-nne"), and third-person plural ("-nsa" or "-nsä"). The choice between "-nsa" and "-nsä" for the third person depends on vowel harmony.

The existence of isiksipäätteellä contributes to the agglutinative nature of Finnish, where multiple morphemes are attached to a root word to convey complex grammatical information. This system allows for concise expression of possession and other grammatical relations without the need for separate possessive pronouns in many contexts.