Estonian/Everything and Nothing

In this lesson we'll go over some important determiners in Estonian.

What are Determiners?
Determiners are a class of words that span over several types of words, such as pronouns and adjectives, which are used to specify nouns. These primarily act like adjectives in general, and include words like my, this, every, no, each, as well as question determiners that can be used to begin interrogative sentences and specify nouns in declarative sentences, such as what, which and who.

Common determiners in Estonian

 * milline - informal short form of missugune

Non-Determiner Vocabulary
The following words are included in this lesson, but are not Determiners because they are standalone words. However, some may be composed of determiners.


 * kõik - kõige - .kõike - all, everything, everyone
 * inimene - inimese - inimest - person, human
 * elu - elu - elu - life
 * kiri - kirja - .kirja - letter

Verbs (shorthand)

 * nägema - näe - ei näe - to see

Enumeration of nouns
Nominative Nouns preceded by an ordinal determiner (1st, 2nd, 3rd, first, last, every etc.) are written in the Nominative. The determiner (e.g. number) will decline along with the noun in all other cases.

The Accusative case (III) marks the partitive in Estonian, and the partitive is used when talking about several (plural) of something (preceded by a cardinal determiner). In this case, the Nominative becomes the Accusative, but all other cases remain the same:


 * paar + kass = kolm .kassi (kass becomes Accusative)
 * paari + kassi = kolme kassi
 * .paari + .kassi = .kolme .kassi