Instrumental case

In linguistics, the instrumental case indicates the instrument through which the subject performs an action. The instrument can either be a physical object or an abstract concept.

Examples

For example, the following sentence in Latin:

Books Calamo scripsi. 'The books I wrote with the pen'

The inflection of the name indicates its role as an instrument. The nominative calamus (feather) changes to calamo. In Latin the grammatical relationship of "instrument" it is expressed by the ablative case endings. Other Indo-European languages, such as Sanskrit and Slavic languages, have specific forms for the instrumental case.

Spanish does not have this case, except for some forms of the personal pronoun (with me, with you, with me), which is why, normally, a Spanish speaker expresses the same thing using the preposition «with»:

We extract the water with a bomb.

In English, the instrumental case has been lost as Old English has gone from being an inflectional language to Modern English being an analytic language.