We have now come to the fourth case in our series of Ukrainian one-sentence plays. For me, as a Swedish-speaker, we are now entering territory that I’m a little bit more unused to. It’s time to talk a little bit about the instrumental case.
Previously we have tried to talk about the different cases as roles in a very small story, and let’s keep on doing that. So far we have talked about the main actor, the direct and indirect subjects of the main actor, and the owner of things. Today we are talking about what is being used. If we start with the basic explanation: Every time you can say that you are doing something WITH an object or person, then that person or object should be written in instrumental case.
I talk with the woman – Розмовляю з жінкою (Rozmovlyayu z zhinkoyu)
What I did here was that I went to Glosbe, and looked up the word for woman. I new since before, that woman is жі́нка (žínka) in Ukrainian (and we have used this word previously in this series), but here I am doing something WITH the woman, which means that she is instrumental in this sentence.
This is a direct screenshot from Glosbe, and here we see that the instrumental case for woman is жі́нкою (žínkoju). So, whenever we are doing something with the woman, we would use that form instead.
Now, instrumental case is being used in some other circumstances as well, mostly related to prepositions. The most common is “з“, which means “with”, literally. But there are also others
- над – above
- під – below
- за – behind
- з – with
- між – between
- пе́ред – in front of
Other words we have used in this series is man and building. So, let’s add the instrumental cases for those as well.
Man is чоловік, as we know from before, and a quick visit to Glosbe tells us that if we do something with the man, we use чолові́ком (cholovíkom).
Building is будинок, and visiting Glosbe gives us буди́нком (budýnkom). So, if I where to stand in front of or behind the building, I would stand behind the буди́нком.
Join us again next week, where we will talk about where we are, the locative case.