lõppide

Lõppide is the Estonian term for endings or suffixes that attach to the end of a word to convey grammatical or semantic information. In linguistics, endings are morphemes added to a stem to indicate categories such as case, number, tense, aspect, mood, person, or derivational meaning. Lõppide can be inflectional, signaling grammatical function without changing the word’s class, or derivational, creating new words or shifting the word’s meaning.

The study of endings is a central part of morphology, the branch of linguistics that analyzes word structure. Endings vary widely across languages in number and kind: some languages, like English, use relatively small sets of endings for plurals or tense (for example, -s for plurals, -ed for past tense). Others, such as Spanish, attach endings to nouns to express gender and number (for example, -o, -a, -os, -as) and to verbs for person and tense. Turkish employs a more extensive system of suffixes to indicate case, possession, tense, and mood, reflecting a highly agglutinative morphology. In many languages, endings interact with the stem, triggering phonological changes or producing multiple simultaneous grammatical markers, a phenomenon known as allomorphy or morphophonology.

Endings thus provide methods for encoding grammatical relationships and lexical meaning within a language, shaping how sentences convey information and how words connect with one another. They are a key line of inquiry in historical linguistics, typology, and language description. See also: inflection, suffix, morpheme, morphology.