grammar In linguistics, the grammar of a natural language is its set of structural constraints on speakers' or writers' composition of clauses, phrases, and words. The term can also refer to the study of such constraints, a field that includes domain ...

, the delative case (

abbreviated An abbreviation (from Latin ''brevis'', meaning ''short'') is a shortened form of a word or phrase, by any method. It may consist of a group of letters or words taken from the full version of the word or phrase; for example, the word ''abbrevia ...

; from la, deferre "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 numerals), which corresponds to one or more potential grammatical functions for a nominal group in a wording. In various languages, nomin ...

in the

Hungarian language Hungarian () is an Uralic language spoken in Hungary and parts of several neighbouring countries. It is the official language of Hungary and one of the 24 official languages of the European Union. Outside Hungary, it is also spoken by Hungarian ...

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 la, efferre "to bring or carry out") is a locative grammatical case with the basic meaning "out of". Usage Uralic languages In Finnish, the elative is typically formed by adding ", in Estonian b ...

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 Finnish may refer to: * Something or someone from, or related to Finland * Culture of Finland * Finnish people or Finns, the primary ethnic group in Finland * Finnish language, the national language of the Finnish people * Finnish cuisine See also ...

, 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