2369: Abessive Case Jun 13, 2021

Finnish is known for its many grammatical cases: an amount that would put Latin to shame. Still, not all of these are as common as others, such as the abbessive case, a.k.a. caritive or privative case. This expresses a lack of something, and would be roughly comparable to the English '-less', for instance in:

raha (money)

rahatta (without money)

but this is increasingly being replaced with other words like 'ilman' meaning 'without' and is already fairly rare to find in normal speech, though still used to some extent in writing. Hungarian also has suffixes and postpositions for this purpose, but the postposition is not considered a suffix and won't have vowel harmony. Other languages, even related languages like Estonian and many Turkic languages use this case fairly productively, so it's not disappearing universally by any means.