käänduvaks

käänduvaks is an Estonian word that translates to "declined" or "inflected" in English, specifically referring to the grammatical process of changing the form of a word, typically a noun, pronoun, adjective, or numeral, to indicate its grammatical function in a sentence. This process is crucial for expressing grammatical relationships such as case, number, and gender.

In Estonian grammar, käänduvaks signifies that a word has undergone declension, meaning its ending has been altered. For instance, a noun might be declined to indicate whether it is the subject of a sentence (nominative case), the direct object (accusative case), or possessed by someone (genitive case). Estonian has a rich case system, with fourteen cases in total, each requiring a specific inflection of the word.

The term is also used to describe the concept of inflection in a broader linguistic context. When discussing how words change their form to fit different grammatical roles, one might refer to this as käänduvaks. Understanding käänduvaks is essential for comprehending Estonian sentence structure and for accurately constructing grammatically correct sentences. It is a fundamental aspect of the language's morphology, dictating how words interact and convey meaning within a larger syntactic framework.