These are so cool! Thanks for making the lists.
I'm once again comparing these to Finnish, and I thought I'd share my thoughts in case anyone else is interested. (I'll use the MA infinitive for Finnish verbs too.)
-ta- & -t- causativeThis one is pretty much the same as in Finnish, but I thought it's interesting how Estonian has two forms (-ta- and -t-) while Finnish has only one (-ttA-):
(Estonian - Finnish)
istuma - istuma 'to sit'
istutama - istuttama 'to plant' (cause to "sit")
jooma - juoma 'to drink'
jootma - juottama 'to water [an animal], to give [someone] something to drink' (cause to drink)
jääma - jäämä 'to remain, to stay'
jätma - jättämä 'to leave' (cause to remain)
-le- frequentative/continuative, aimless
olema 'to be'
olesklema 'to idle' (to "be" in a continuously non-intensive manner)
This reminded me... Did you know that you won't get a residence permit here? Instead, you'll be granted
oleskelulupa, or a 'permission to be idle'...
hoidma 'to keep, to preserve'
hoidlema 'to protect' (to repeatedly or continuously keep)
A funny false friend here:
hoitama 'to nurse, to care; to take care of; to finish, to square away'
hoitelema (slang) 'to have sex with'; also
hoidella (pois) päiviltä 'to kill'
(but hoitelema also has a more innocent meaning of 'to take care of something, to do some task (continously and/or indifferently)')-tse- frequentative, gradual or prolonged
This one exists in Finnish (e.g.
häiritsemä 'to disturb',
palkitsema 'to reward) but not for any of the words you listed here! That's really weird because all the other groups have at least a few words that I can recognise.
I'm especially frustrated with these two:
ahne - ahne 'greedy'
ahnitsema - ahnehtima 'to take for oneself' (greedily)
hell - hellä 'tender, gentle'
hellutsema - hellimä 'to be gentle, to be delicate'
The meanings are the same, the root is the same, but the derivational suffix is not!
harva 'seldom, rarely'
harvendama 'to thin' (to make more seldom or rare)
Finnish
harventama can also mean 'to remove some plants or parts thereof in order to improve the growth of those remaining'. Does Estonian have this too?
paras 'suitable, proper, fitting'
parandama 'to repair, to fix, to improve' (to make [more] suitable)
Are you sure the stem is
paras and not (Proto-Finnic)
para ('good, healthy, suitable')?
täht (tähe-) 'star'
tähendama 'to signify, to mean'
Thanks to this, I finally realised why
tähendama has always sounded so familiar. There's the verb
tähdentämä ('to emphasize, highlight'), which also comes from star and has the same suffix as in Estonian, but I never connected the dots because the meanings of
tähendama, tähdentämä and
täht(i) are so different...
Another false friend:
hoidma 'to hold, to carry'
hoiduma 'to avoid, to refrain'
hoitama 'to nurse, to care; to take care of; to finish, to square away'
hoituma 'to be fixed, to happen in an effortless manner'
-du- reflexive
variant of -u- when the stem has a long vowel or dipthong followed by -l, -n, or -r.
I thought this was interesting because that variant doesn't exist in Finnish:
kuulma - kuulema 'to hear'
kuulduma - kuuluma 'to be heard, to be talked about'
painama - painama 'to afflict, to harass, to haunt, to oppress'; dialect: 'to bend' (transitive) / 'to press, to weigh, to strain, to cause anxiety/concern'
painduma - painuma 'to bend, to flex' (intransitive) / 'to sink, to sag, to droop, to fall, to descend'
juurima 'to uproot, to pull up by the root'
juurduma 'to entrench, to take root' (note also change in meaning: it is not "to uproot oneself")
This one is interesting because in Finnish, the stem of
juurtuma 'to take root' is
juurtama '(figuratively) to have its roots in (of phenomena, opinions etc.)' and not
juurima 'to uproot, root up, root (to tear up by the roots)'. Similarly,
ääntymä 'to be pronounced, be enunciated, be articulated' is derived from
ääntämä 'to pronounce, enunciate, articulate', unlike Estonian
häälima vs häälduma.
-bu-reflexive, intransitive & -bi- reflexive, intransitiveNobody asked, but apparently these come from an old variant of the suffix -v (as in
olema > olev) and -U, which has become -u or -i in Estonian. (According to the old rule about consonant gradation in suffixes, you used the weak form -vA in unstressed syllables, and -pA in stressed syllables. Cf. Finnish
käypä ('acceptable, decent'; from
käydä/
käima),
juopa ('gulf, gap'; from
juoda/jooma),
syöpä ('cancer', from
syödä/sööma, voipa ('being', in compounds; e.g.
kaikkivoipa 'omnipotent', from
voida/võima.)
Anyway, this one caught my attention:
viima - viemä 'to lead to, to take'
viibima - viipymä 'to stay'
It's weird Finnish has two different stems there (vie- and vii-). Are you sure
viibima comes from
viima? Wiktionary wasn't very helpful this time, but it seems that
viima and
viemä come from Proto-Finnic *veedäk (and Proto-Uralic *wixe-), whereas
viipymä has the same root as in Proto-Finno-Ugric *wiŋe.
-ne- translative, gradualI think this one is also interesting! As far as I can tell, we don't have it in Finnish except with adjectives: there are pairs like
halpa - halpenema, nuori - nuorenema, paksu - paksunema, pimeä - pimenemä, vanha - vanhenema, but not anything like
sulama - sulanema or
kivi - kivinema in Estonian. (There is a word for 'to petrify' that is derived from
kivi, but it's done with -ttAA + U:
kivettyä or kivettymä.)