kaotasin

Kaotasin is the first-person singular past tense form of the Estonian verb kaotama, meaning "to lose." It is used to describe an instance of losing something in the past, and it appears in ordinary speech and writing as part of the standard conjugation of kaotama. The form commonly functions in declarative past clauses without requiring any auxiliary verbs.

In typical usage, kaotasin accompanies a direct object to specify what was lost. For example, Ma kaotasin võtmed eile translates to "I lost the keys yesterday." The past tense paradigm of kaotama also yields other forms for different subjects, such as ta kaotas (he/she lost) and me kaotasime (we lost), while the conditional mood is kaotaksin ("I would lose").

Phonology and morphology in Estonian are such that kaotasin preserves the root kaot- with a standard past-tense suffix, reflecting regular patterns of -ma verbs in the language. Because Estonian is an agglutinative language with rich morphology, past-tense forms like kaotasin can carry information about subject, time, and aspect within the verb itself, reducing the need for additional auxiliary verbs in many contexts.

See also kaotama, the verb meaning "to lose," and related Estonian verb forms that illustrate how tense and mood are expressed in the language. While kaotasin is primarily a grammatical form, it is also encountered in everyday discourse to recount past events involving loss.