In
grammar
In linguistics, grammar is the set of rules for how a natural language is structured, as demonstrated by its speakers or writers. Grammar rules may concern the use of clauses, phrases, and words. The term may also refer to the study of such rul ...
, the delative case (
abbreviated
An abbreviation () is a shortened form of a word or phrase, by any method including shortening, contraction, initialism (which includes acronym), or crasis. An abbreviation may be a shortened form of a word, usually ended with a trailing per ...
; from "to bear or bring away or down") is a
grammatical case
A grammatical case is a category of nouns and noun modifiers (determiners, adjectives, participles, and Numeral (linguistics), numerals) that corresponds to one or more potential grammatical functions for a Nominal group (functional grammar), n ...
in the
Hungarian language
Hungarian, or Magyar (, ), is an Ugric language of the Uralic language family spoken in Hungary and parts of several neighboring countries. It is the official language of Hungary and one of the 24 official languages of the European Union. Out ...
which originally expressed the movement from the surface of something (e.g. "off the table"), but has also taken on several other meanings (e.g. "about people"), some of which are related to the original (e.g. "from the post office").
In addition to obvious movement off a surface (such as a table), Hungarian uses the delative case to express the origin of movement from some cities and places; when one is expressing that something comes from (or is coming from) a place, the name of the place is put into the delative case. Generally, Hungary itself and most Hungarian cities are placed into the delative case (foreign cities and some Hungarian cities use the
elative case
In grammar, the elative case (abbreviated ; from "to bring or carry out") is a locative grammatical case signifying that something comes from something, somewhere or someone.
Usage Uralic languages
In Finnish, the elative is typically formed ...
in this context).
:I came from Budapest ().
:The train from Hungary () is coming ().
With the same meaning as in Hungarian (where something comes from, origin of movement), the delative is also used for some words as an adverbial case in
Finnish,
e.g.:
* - from here
* - from over there
* - from there
* - from elsewhere
* - from elsewhere, on the other hand
* - from one place
References
External links
The delative case- a discussion of the delative case in Hungarian from HungarianReference.com.
{{Grammatical cases
Grammatical cases
Hungarian language
Finnish language