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Ablative of specification denotes the thing in respect to which something is specified: maior nātū "older by birth". [10] Ablative of description or of quality is an ablative modified by an adjective or genitive that expresses a quality that something has: vir summā virtūte "a gentleman of highest virtue". [11]
The dative singular is the same as the genitive singular in first- and fifth-declension pure Latin nouns. The dative is always the same as the ablative in the singular in the second declension, the third-declension full i-stems (i.e. neuter i-stems, adjectives), and fourth-declension neuters.
Introduction to the ablative case from a 1903 Latin textbook. In grammar, the ablative case (pronounced / ˈ æ b l ə t ɪ v / AB-lə-tiv; sometimes abbreviated abl) is a grammatical case for nouns, pronouns, and adjectives in the grammars of various languages. It is used to indicate motion away from something, make comparisons, and serve ...
Latin is a heavily inflected language with largely free word order. Nouns are inflected for number and case; pronouns and adjectives (including participles) are inflected for number, case, and gender; and verbs are inflected for person, number, tense, aspect, voice, and mood.
Ablative case is used to modify verbs and can be translated as 'by', 'with', 'from', etc. Vocative case is used to address a person or thing. The genitive, dative, accusative, and ablative also have important functions to indicate the object of a preposition. Given below is the declension paradigm of Latin puer 'boy' and puella 'girl':
"Dative" comes from Latin cāsus datīvus ("case for giving"), a translation of Greek δοτικὴ πτῶσις, dotikē ptôsis ("inflection for giving"). [2] Dionysius Thrax in his Art of Grammar also refers to it as epistaltikḗ "for sending (a letter)", [3] from the verb epistéllō "send to", a word from the same root as epistle.
The English word case used in this sense comes from the Latin casus, which is derived from the verb cadere, "to fall", from the Proto-Indo-European root ḱh₂d-. [8] The Latin word is a calque of the Greek πτῶσις, ptôsis, lit. "falling, fall". [9] The sense is that all other cases are considered to have "fallen" away from the nominative.
Latin word order is relatively free. The verb may be found at the beginning, in the middle, or at the end of a sentence; an adjective may precede or follow its noun (vir bonus or bonus vir both mean 'a good man'); [5] and a genitive may precede or follow its noun ('the enemies' camp' can be both hostium castra and castra hostium; the latter is more common). [6]