Estonian grammar


Estonian grammar is the grammar of the Estonian language.

Grammatical processes

Consonant gradation

Estonian consonant gradation is a grammatical process that affects obstruent consonants at the end of the stressed syllable of a word. Gradation causes consonants in a word to alternate between two grades, termed "strong" and "weak", depending on the grammar. Some grammatical forms trigger the weak grade, while others retain the strong grade. It is not predictable which form will have which grade; this must simply be memorised. Not all words show gradation. In particular, words with stems of three or more syllables generally do not gradate, nor do words with stems of one syllable.
Gradation correlates with the appearance of extra length on a syllable. When a syllable is long, the strong grade will always be accompanied by extra length. The weak grade may or may not have extra length, depending on other factors. These are mentioned at Estonian phonology - Suprasegmental length. Some words show gradation only through the presence of absence or extra length, and the consonants themselves do not change. In this article, extra length is shown with a backtick ` before the vowel of the syllable.
The gradation patterns of geminate consonants are relatively simple:
StrongWeakExample
ppps`epp: sepa
tttv`õtta: võtan
kkkh`akkama: hakata
pbk`upja: kubjas, k`ilp: kilbi
tds`aatev: saadan, k`artma: kardan
kgv`ilkuma: vilgun
sssk`irss: kirsi

Patterns for single plosives are more varied and unpredictable. The weak grade may involve disappearance of the consonant altogether, with further consequences for vowels and extra length.
StrongWeakExampleNotes
bvk`aebama: kaevata
b∅tuba: t`oaWhen next to u.
d, t∅`aed: aia, l`eht: leheVoiceless t appears in the cluster ht.
d, tjrada: rajaWhen followed by a and preceded by a short vowel other than e or i.
g, k∅`arg: ara, lugema: l`oen, h`ahk: hahaVoiceless k appears in the clusters hk and sk.
g, kjm`ärg: märjaWhen followed by a or e and preceded by l or r which is preceded by e, ä or ü.

There are also four special assimilative patterns:
StrongWeakExample
mbmmh`amba : hammas
ndnnk`andma : kannan
ldllp`õld: põllu
rdrrk`ord: korra

When a consonant is reduced to zero in the weak grade, this may cause the vowels of the two adjacent syllables to come together. These vowels undergo several changes:
Assibilation is a change that happened in Proto-Finnic: the sequence ti became si. This change is no longer productive or predictable, but a fair number of nouns still display the effects in certain forms. The effect is visible in that sometimes s appears where there would otherwise be a t or d. This also creates new variants of the gradation patterns mentioned above, with s appearing in some of the forms in both the strong and weak grade.
For example:
Inflectional endings as listed below are added to the stem of a noun, which is formed from:
Singular nominative, singular genitive and singular partitive are not predictable and have to be taken from the vocabulary.
Singular genitive always ends in vowel. When formed from a stem that ends in consonant, it can take the following endings: -a, -e, -i, -o, -u.
Singular partitive can take the following endings: -d, -t, -a, -e, -i, -u.
Plural partitive is formed from either singular genitive or singular partitive and can take the following endings :
Singular illative has a short form in some words. It can take the following endings: -de, -he, -hu, -a, -e, -i, -u. In case it takes the vowel ending, this vowel is the same as the ending vowel of the singular genitive form of the given word, but the vowel or its preceding consonant is lengthened to the third degree and thus becomes overlong. If illative ends with -sesse, then the short form is -sse.
Plural illative, inessive, elative, allative, adessive, ablative, translative have a short form in some words. If the plural partitive ends with -id, then the short plural stem is this form without -d ; if it ends with a vowel, then the short plural stem is this form; if it ends with -sid, then the short plural cannot be formed.
Emphasis: noun + -gi / -ki.
New nouns can be derived from existing nouns, adjectives and verbs using suffixes like -ja, -mine, -la, -nna, -tar, -ur, -stik, -ndik, -nik, -ik, -k, -ng, -lane, -line, -kene, -ke, -e, -ndus, -dus, -us, -is, -kond, -nd, -istu, -u.

Pronouns

There are traditionally considered to be 14 noun cases in Estonian:
Locative cases make up six or eight of these fourteen.
There are also some additional cases such as the prolative, or the similarly formed instructive, which are not traditionally counted among the 14 grammatical cases.

Adjectives

Inflectional endings as listed below are added to the stem of an adjective, which is formed like the one for nouns.
The stem for the comparative and superlative forms is the singular genitive of an adjective; if a word has two syllables in the genitive or a vowel following -ke, then -ke is left out and the last vowel in the stem changes to -e. The genitive and the partitive of the comparative itself are formed with -a and -at.
New adjectives can be derived from existing words by means of suffixes like:
Antonym can be formed by prepending eba or mitte to an adjective. Eba- is considered to be the only derivational prefix in Estonian; as mitte can also occur as a separate word, mitte + adjective can be regarded as a compound rather than derivative. Alternatively, for an adjective formed from a noun or a verb, an antonym can often be constructed using the suffix -tu or -matu.

Pro-adjectives

The following lists are not exhaustive.
Postpositions
Prepositions
The inflectional endings as listed below are added to the stem of a verb, which is formed from:
Present tense form and -tud participle are derived from the infinitives on the basis of gradation.
-ma infinitive indicates action that has either happened, is happening or will happen. It can be declined: -ma, -mas, -mast, -maks, -mata.
-da infinitive indicates hypothetical action, i.e. the action in general. It is used, for example, following ei, et, and oskama/võima. It can be declined: -des.
Verb derivation: -ta-, -u- / -i-, -el- / -le-, -ne-, -ata-, -el- / -skle-, -tse-.
Emphasis: verb + -gi / -ki, verb + küll, verb + mitte.

Adverbs

Inflectional endings as listed below are added to the stem of an adverb, which is formed from:
Some adverbs are special words - original or vestigial forms of an ancient instructive case.
Pro-adverbs
The neutral word order in Estonian is subject–verb–object.
Conjunctions:
Questions begin with an interrogative word, eks, ega ), followed by the SVO word order ; answers: jah/jaa, ei. An adjective precedes the noun it modifies. An adverb of time precedes an adverb of place.
However, as one would expect from an agglutinative language, the word order is quite free and non-neutral word order can be used to stress some parts of the sentence or in poetic texts, as in Finnish grammar. For example, consider the sentence mees tappis karu which means man killed bear and uses the neutral SVO word order. The sentence can be rephrased using OVS word order as karu tappis mees—a normal Estonian sentence that could be more precisely translated as it was man who killed the bear, i. e. the speaker emphasizes that the killer was a man, probably assuming the listener knows that a bear was killed. The other four word orders are also possible in certain contexts, especially if more words are added to the three-word sentences.
Sometimes the forms of verbs, nouns and adjectives in the sentence are not enough to determine the subject and object, e. g. mehed tapsid karud or isa tappis karu —in the first sentence because in plural, the nominative case is used in Estonian both for subject and telic object, and in the second sentence because in singular, the nominative, genitive and partitive forms of the word isa are the same, as well as those of the word karu. In such sentences, word order is the only thing that distinguishes the subject and the object: the listener presumes that the former noun is the subject and the latter is the object. In such situations, the speaker cannot interchange the subject and the object for emphasis.