tavuttaa

Tavuttaa is a Finnish verb meaning to divide a word into syllables, a process known as tavutus. Tavuttaminen is important in understanding pronunciation and spelling, and it is commonly discussed in language teaching, dictionaries, and text processing. The term is mainly used in linguistic and educational contexts and is not part of everyday spoken Finnish.

The word tavuttaa is formed from the noun tavu (syllable) with the derivational suffix -uttaa, which in Finnish typically yields verbs that express performing or causing an action. As a result, tavuttaa means to perform syllabification—i.e., to break a word into its syllables. The verb follows regular conjugation patterns of -uttaa verbs. For example, present tense forms include minä tavutan, sinä tavutat, hän tavuttaa; the passive form is tavutetaan, and other common tense forms align with standard Finnish verb conjugation.

Usage of tavuttaa spans education, orthography, and computational linguistics. In schools, it is taught to help students pronounce and spell words correctly. In dictionaries and hyphenation guidelines, tavutus determines where words can be split at line breaks. In technology, syllabification is used in speech synthesis, text-to-speech systems, and natural language processing to improve phonological analysis and word segmentation.

Esimerkki: sana 'kettu' tavutetaan ke-ttu. See also tavu, tavutus, tavuttaminen.