luottavaan

Luottavaan is a Finnish inflected form that functions as the illative singular of the adjective or present participle luottava, which means trusting or trustworthy. The form is built from the verb luottaa, “to trust,” with the present-participle suffix -va, yielding luottava, and the illative case ending -an, yielding luottavaan. In this construction, luottavaan is used to indicate movement toward or direction into a state or quality described by the adjective.

In practice, luottavaan is not a common stand-alone dictionary entry in modern Finnish. The more widely used adjective for the idea of reliability is luotettava, meaning “trustworthy” or “reliable.” The illative form luottavaan may appear in older literary texts or in poetic or stylistic contexts where Finnish authors employ adjective illatives to convey movement toward a state, similar to the way other adjectives can take illative endings in certain constructions. Because of this, encounters of luottavaan outside specialized or historical texts are relatively rare.

Related concepts include luottamus, the abstract noun meaning “trust,” and luotettava, the everyday adjective for reliability. When choosing between these forms, speakers generally opt for luotettava or luottamus in contemporary prose and everyday speech, reserving luottavaan for particular stylistic or historical uses.