Grammar: inner local cases

Estonian has three cases to talk about physical bodies and volumes.

Estonian has a reputation for being difficult because it has a lot of grammatical cases.

Here’s a quick refresher about grammatical cases:

• they are a specific form of a noun (thing-word) or adjective (description-word) that indicates a special function in the sentence

• some cases don’t indicate a function, but give you more meaningful context

English has leftovers of the Germanic case system in the forms of the personal pronouns: he, his, him correspond to the Nominative (who does it), Genitive (whose is it), and Accusative case (to whom is it done).

These roughly correspond to the Estonian noun’s base forms.

Now, let’s take a look at a convenient group of three cases, the so-called inner local cases:

• the “illative” (Estonian: “sisseütlev” - “into-saying”): movement into the inside of a 3D body or volume,

• the “inessive” (Estonian: “seesütlev” - “inside-saying”): static position inside of a 3D body or volume,

• the “elative” (Estonian: “seestütlev” - “outside-saying”): movement out of (from within) a 3D body or volume

They are called “inner local cases” because they talk about the “insides” of something.

In this article, we’re taking a detailed look at the Illative case 👇