Grammar: overview of the cases

Over the last few weeks, we covered all of the cases in Estonian. Time to tie it all together.

Over the last couple of weeks, we covered all of the cases in Estonian:

• Nominative, Genitive, and Partitive and why you need to learn them,

• The “inner local cases”, referring to the insides of things:

  • Inessive (“in”),

  • Illative (“into”),

  • and Elative (“out of”)

• The “outer local cases”, referring to surfaces and surroundings:

  • Adessive (“on”, “at”),

  • Allative (“onto”, “to”),

  • and Ablative (“off of”, “from”)

• The “states of being cases”, referring to the role something is filling or state something is in:

  • Essive (“as”, “being”)

  • Translative (“for the purpose of”, “becoming”)

  • the extinct Exessive ("unbecoming”)

• The “rest”, which doesn’t form neat groups:

  • Comitative (“with”)

  • Abessive (“without”)

  • Terminative (“until”, “up to”)

Whew, that’s a lot of cases!

If this seems like a lot, remember that Hungarian has even more 😄

👨‍🔬 Putting all this information can be daunting, so here’s a handy summary of the formulas that yield all of these forms 👇