Delative case explained

In grammar, the delative case (abbreviated ; from Latin: deferre "to bear or bring away or down") is a grammatical case in the Hungarian language 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 this context).

I came from Budapest (Hungarian: Budapest'''ről''' jöttem).

The train from Hungary is coming (Hungarian: Jön a vonat Magyarország'''ról''').

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,[1] e.g.:

External links

The delative case - a discussion of the delative case in Hungarian from HungarianReference.com.

Notes and References

  1. Web site: Mäkinen. Panu. Finnish Grammar - Adverbial Cases. users.jyu.fi. University of Jyväskylä. 6 March 2015.