maintaining its national identity. Estonian language uses the Latin alphabet and it has 32 letters. An interesting feature that sets Estonian apart from most languages is the vowel. The most unusal ones for foreingers are ä,ö,õ and ü. The language also has grammar durations and declinations. There are three durations (short, long and extra long and ) and fourteen decliantions. These are possibly the hardest thing for a foreinger to learn. Also postpositions are used quite often. In Estonian no articles or genders are used. Most loans come from German language. 9
Inflection is a general grammatical process that combines words and affixes to produce alternative grammatical forms of words. Inflectional affixes are always suffixes in English. consider, considers, considered Open vs. Closed class words: In linguistics, a closed class (or closed word class) is a word class to which no new items can normally be added, and that usually contains a relatively small number of items. Typical closed classes found in many languages are adpositions (prepositions and postpositions), determiners, conjunctions, and pronouns.[1] Contrastingly, an open class offers possibilities for expansion. Typical open classes such as nouns and verbs can and do get new words often, through the usual means such as compounding,derivation, coining, borrowing, etc. [2] Syntax: studies how words group together to make phrases and sentences. Sentences are not simply random strings of words; they conform to specific patterns determined by the syntactic rules of the language.