Finnish locative system

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The Finnish language has eight locative cases, and some Eastern dialects symmetrify the system with the excessive case. These can be classified according to a three-way contrast of entering, residing and exiting a state, and there are three different systems of these cases.

System	Entering	Residing	Exiting
Inner	-(h)Vn "into" (illative)	-ssa "in" (inessive)	-sta "from (in)" (elative)
Outer	-lle "onto" (allative)	-lla "on" (adessive)	-lta "from (at/on)" (ablative)
State	-ksi "into as" (translative)	-na "as" (essive)	-nta "from being as" (excessive)

(The symbol "V" in the illative case denotes an epenthetic vowel, which is the preceding vowel in Finnish, e.g. tie → tiehen, and the -h- elides whenever a long vowel can be used instead, e.g. ryhmä → ryhmään.)

It is immediately noticeable from the table that the "exiting" forms (sta/lta/nta) have the same consonant as the "residing" forms (ssa/lla/na) added with the Finnish partitive case ending -ta. This may be traced into a Proto-Uralic ablative ending. Also, the Finnish system is somewhat simpler than in the Hungarian language, where there is a separate system for "to the top", "on top", and "off from the top".

Here is an example incorporating all the locative cases using a single noun: Kirjalla oli kurssikirjana käytetty kirja. Tästä kirjasta ei löytynyt paljon asiaa, joten kirjalle ei voinut muuta tehdä kuin laittaa se pois kurssikirjanta ja ottaa kurssikirjaksi uusi kirja. Uudessa kirjassa oli paremmat kuvat ja kirjaan oli sisällytetty uuttakin asiaa, joten kirjalta pystyi vaatimaankin enemmän. "On the book there was a book that was used as a course book. From this book you couldn't find a lot of material, so you couldn't do anything to the book but put it down from being a course book and take a new book (into) as a course book. In this book there were better pictures and also new material was included into the book, so you could also expect more from the book."