päätteisiin

Päätteisiin is a Finnish term used to refer to the set of word endings that attach to stems to indicate grammatical information. In Finnish linguistics, endings are called päätteet, and Finnish is known for its extensive use of suffixes in inflection. The concept encompasses all inflectional endings across parts of speech and their combinations in word forms.

The endings attach to stems in a systematic way: nouns take case and number suffixes, verbs take person, number, mood, tense, and voice suffixes, and adjectives or pronouns may also carry endings to agree with nouns. The result is a chained suffix structure, where several endings may occur in sequence on a single word. Endings are influenced by vowel harmony, phonology, and historical development, and they can show allomorphy—different surface shapes that express the same grammatical category.

Common noun endings express cases such as inside, from, to, or in various numbers, yielding forms like talo (house) to talossa (in the house) or talosta (from the house). Verbal endings convey information about who performs an action, the time frame of the action, and the mode of the statement, as in forms that indicate tense or potential mood. Finnish also employs possessive suffixes and plural markers that interact with other endings.

Understanding päätteisiin is important for language learning, grammar reference, and computational processing of Finnish, where morphological analyzers and lemmatizers rely on recognizing the role and order of endings. They are central to how meaning is packed into Finnish words without relying on word order alone.

See also: Finnish language, inflection, morphology, agglutination, case system.