Ablative (grammar)

The ablative (modern Greek: αφαιρετική πτώση; Latin: Ablativus) is, in linguistics, a grammatical case that generally indicates the circumstances of place, time, modo, de causa, de agente, etc., expressed in Spanish by means of the prepositions en, por, con, sin, sobre, etc. For example: In the garden there are flowers, He died for his country, etc. In other words, the ablative usually indicates the syntactic function of circumstantial complement. Some personal pronouns in Spanish have ablative forms, such as mí, ti, sí, conmigo, contigo, consejo; in the rest of the pronouns, these coincide with the nominative-vocative form (tú/vos, él, ella, tú/usted, nosotros, etc.)

The ablative is used in inflectional languages: Indo-European such as Latin or Sanskrit; Uralic languages such as Finnish or Hungarian; Altaic languages such as Turkish, or even in Basque.

Its name comes from the Latin ablatiuus, in turn from ablatum, the supine form of the verb auferre " remove, put away"; since in this language there was such a case that in certain contexts had the sense of place from where something is removed or set aside. This case existed in Latin, but not in classical Greek.

In Latin

The Latin ablative combined, through syncretism, the sense of the strict ablative case (indicating «from», provenance), with that of instrumental (indicating «by» in passive constructions or «with») and sometimes the of the locative (indicating "en"). Secondarily, other specializations of the ablative have been developed, such as the "ablative of cause" (which indicates the «causative») or the "ablative of time" (which indicates the "moment", derived from the locative), the ablative that indicates the term with which it is compared and the absolute ablative.

Examples. In Latin we have:

Nominative: Pink '[la/una] rose', Mons '[the] mountain.'

Ablativo sing: rosā 'by/with... [the] rose', Mount 'for/with/for... [the] mountain.'

Ablative plural: rosīs 'by/with... [the] roses,' montibus 'for/with/for... [the] mountains.'

Regarding the ablative, Monlau says: «This case of declension is exclusively typical of Latin; ablatiuus proprius est romanorum, says Priscian; and they called it ablative or quitative, because it removes the value of the preposition that is involved or included in the dative. Julius Caesar, in the midst of his Gallic War, dictated in his tent a grammatical treatise Of Analogy, which he dedicated to Cicero, and in which the name is found for the first time. ablative to designate the sixth case of the Latin declension, which had no proper name, because it does not exist in the Greek language».

In Finnish

In Finnish (suomi), the ablative case is the sixth locative case. Its basic meaning is "to express the (open) place from where a displacement occurs." Example: in Finnish, el (suffix -lta/-ltä): piha means “garden” -> pihalta "from the garden." Internal reconstruction has shown that this case, like other Finnish lative cases, comes from the fusion of a locative mark (*-l) plus a separative (*-ta). For example, if we compare the formation of various "secondary" we can see that they are made up of an element that indicates whether the type of locative is interior or exterior (*-s / *-l) plus a separative mark (*-ta) or locative proper *-na:

Local cases:

Inesive: kala-ssa 'in [the inside] of the fish'kala-s-na.

Elative: kala-sta 'outside [inner] of the fish'kala-s-ta.

Offshore cases:

Adhesive: kala-lla 'on [the surface] of the fish.'kala-l-na.

Ablative: kala-lta 'from [the surface] of the fish.'kala-l-ta.