Social:Respective case

The respective case (also called the dedative or relative) is a grammatical case invented by J. R. R. Tolkien in his constructed language Quenya (the elven language of the book The Lord of the Rings). It is not clear if this case is used with prepositions, transitive or intransitive verbs, or has a more general use. Based on a few examples, one linguist has deduced the possibility that it is used as a kind of locative (e.g.: i coa i taures / i coa i tauressë the house in the forest).

Another possible use is to translate expressions with the preposition “about.” For example, in translating “He told me about the invasion,” the Quenya word for “invasion” might appear in the respective/dedative. The seeming absence of any other case being used to translate this preposition lends support to this conjecture. In the constructed language Ithkuil the case corresponding to the preposition about is called Referential case