iällä

iällä is the adessive singular form of the Finnish nounikä, meaning age. In Finnish grammar, iällä marks a temporal point connected to age, and it is used to specify “at the age of” a certain number of years. The form belongs to the set of case endings that attach to ikä to express location or state in relation to age.

Grammatical role and formation: iällä is formed from the base ikä with the adessive suffix -llä, producing a phrase that links an age reference to a time or moment. It is often found in more formal or descriptive contexts, such as linguistic descriptions of age-related events or development.

Usage notes: iällä is typically used with numerals or age expressions to indicate a point in time in a person’s or animal’s life when something occurs or is observed. While it appears in written Finnish and scholarly writing, everyday speech may favor other constructions, such as referring to age with years or using different cases or prepositional phrases to convey similar meaning.

Related terms: ikä (age) is the root word; other related expressions deal with age in different ways, such as phrases indicating age progression or eligibility thresholds. The choice between iällä and alternative forms depends on register, cadence, and the specific syntactic context.

Example: Kolmen vuoden iällä hän aloitti koulun. This illustrates how iällä can anchor an event to a precise age in a formal or descriptive sentence.

In summary, iällä is a grammatical form used to denote the age-related moment at which something occurs, mainly in more formal or descriptive Finnish.