sanavartalo

Sanavartalo, or word stem, is the base part of a word that remains when inflectional endings are stripped away. In linguistic analysis, the sanavartalo is the form to which inflectional and derivational affixes attach to produce new word forms. It is a practical notion for understanding how words are formed and how they relate to each other within a paradigm.

The sanavartalo is related to, but not identical with, other related concepts such as root and lemma. A root (juuri) is the minimal semantic unit of a word, while the lemma is the dictionary form used as the canonical entry. The sanavartalo is specifically the form that serves as the anchor for attaching affixes in a given word’s inflectional pattern; in simple cases it coincides with the lemma, but in words with derivation or irregular morphology it can differ.

How the sanavartalo is identified can depend on the language and the word class. In Finnish, for example, verbs commonly reveal a stem like puhu- from the infinitive puhua, which is shared by multiple conjugated forms such as puhun, puhut, and puhuvat. A noun such as talo typically has a stem like talo- that carries through inflected forms such as talossa (in the house) and talon (of the house). In compounds, the stem may involve the whole word or strategies can vary depending on the analytic approach.

In practice, sanavartalo is a central concept in language teaching, lexicography, and natural language processing. It underpins how word families are analyzed, how dictionaries organize entries, and how algorithms perform stemming and morphological parsing. See also lemma, root, and inflection.