Estonian

From UniLang Wiki

Tere! Estonian belongs to the Baltic-Finnic subgroup of Finno-Ugric family of languages, and is very closely related to Finnish and fairly distantly related to Hungarian. It is spoken as an official language in the Republic of Estonia, and is referred to by its (approximately) 1.1 million speakers as eesti keel.

The Estonian language consists of 14 grammatical cases: Nominative, Genitive, Partitive, Inessive, Illative, Elative, Allative, Adessive, Abessive, Ablative, Translative, Terminative, Essive and Comitative.

More informations about the case endings and it's usage at Timm's Estonian Page

Notes on partitive and genitive formations

In Estonian, there are 90 patterns for declining a noun. There is a dictionary that declines the nouns based on these patterns, for more than 100000 words. You can see it in this link:

For example, the word Sõnaraamat (dictionary) and the word raamat (book) both decline like this:
Sõnaraamat
Genitive - sõnaraamatu
Partitive - sõnaraamatut
Partitive plural - sõnaraamatuid

Raamat
Genitive - raamatu
Partitive - raamatut
Partitive plural - raamatuid

They both belong to the pattern lapsik:
Lapsik
Genitive - lapsiku
Partitive - lapsikut
Partitive plural - lapsikuid

The word keel (language) is of the same pattern as suur. They both decline like this:
Genitive - keele / suure
Partitive - keelt / suurt
Partitive plural - keelde / suurde

Now notice this: the word toit (food) is of the same pattern as kimp:
Genitive - kimbu
Partitive - kimpu
Partitive plural - kimpusid

In this pattern, the last consonant (voiceless) changes to a voiced consonant in the Genitive. As toit is of the same pattern as kimp, so it declines like this:
Genitive - toidu
Partitive - toitu
Partitive plural - toitusid

The word ilm (word) is of the same pattern as õrn. They both decline like this:
Genitive - ilma / õrna
Partitive - ilma / õrna
Partitive plural - ilmu / õrnu

Estonian Morphological Analyzer - decomposes the inflected Estonian words, showing its Nominative and the case it's representing. for example, keele --> keel+0 //_S_ sg g, //
Estonian dictionary - shows the inflection of more than 100000 Estonian words, based on 90 patterns of nouns and 200 patterns of verbs.
Estonian verb conjugator and noun declinator
Estonian-English Dictionary
Estonian Thesaurus
Learn Estonian Language - forum, chat, and more
Learn to Speak Estonian
Other Online Resources