The ablative case is a noun or adjective form found in inflected languages, expressing motion or means. Latin and Greek have it, and adjectives modifying ablative nouns are also in the ablative case. A preposition defines the relationship of the noun to the sentence.
The ablative case is a form of noun or adjective that can express a number of different functions, including motion or means. It is found in inflected languages, those in which the grammatical role of a word in a sentence is determined by the form of the word, usually a prefix or suffix. Words in the ablative case are often the subject of prepositions, but can also perform a variety of other functions, depending on the language.
Latin and Greek are the most commonly familiar inflected languages in the Western world, although Albanian, Sanskrit, Turkish, and a number of other languages are also inflected. The functions of the Greek ablative case were absorbed into the genitive or dative cases in Homer’s time, but both classical and ecclesiastical Latin contain an ablative case. A Latin ablative noun or adjective takes its form according to the declension of the word. Latin has five declensions, or sets of endings, which are used to differentiate the cases of words. For example, a first-declension Latin ablative will end in -ā, while second-declension ablatives will end in -ō.
Since the ablative case most often expresses something about position or movement, it is usually the subject of a preposition, which defines the specific relationship of the noun to the rest of the sentence. For example, the Latin prepositional phrase “ab agricolā” means “far from the field”. The object, “agricola”, is in the ablative case. This sentence may also contain other words in the ablative case. In English, these are functions that would generally be expressed by an adverbial phrase, such as “by way of.”
Adjectives that modify ablative nouns will also be in the ablative case, but this doesn’t mean that the noun and the adjective will always have the same ending. Like nouns, adjectives in an inflected language are divided according to declension. If the noun and the adjective belong to the same declension, i.e. they use the same set of endings, they will very often have the same ending. On the other hand, a noun in the first declension and an adjective in the third declension probably won’t have the same ending.
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