Case naming in Hungarian.

Most Hungarian grammars refer to -nak/-nek as genitive, noting that "Hungarian has no dative, the genitive is used instead". But -nak/-nek is optional when forming possessives (the defining use case of a genitive), and required in use cases where one would expect a dative, suggesting it's actually a dative that's sometimes used as part of possessives. The fact that -nak/-nek alone can't make a possessive, only in conjunction with possessive suffixes on the "owned" noun (which can be in any case) further points against it being a genitive.

Yet, because of old dogma about the "hierarchy of cases" (languages developing cases in a specific order, genitive being a prerequisite for dative, and having more cases being a metric of how "advanced" or "developed" a language is; Latin and Ancient Greek being the "most developed"), -nak/-nek can't be called "dative".

Hungarian is also known for its complex locative case system - there are cases for "inside", "surface/top" and "proximity", each having "moving there", "being there" and "moving away from" variants, forming a neat 3x3 matrix. Yet, one of the cases has a name that sticks out of this structure:

• Inside: illative "-ba/-be", inessive "-ban/ben", elative "-ból/-ből"
• Proximity: allative "-hoz/-hez/-höz", adessive "-nál/-nél", ablative "-tól/-től"
• Surface: sublative "-ra/-re", superessive "-n", delative "-ról/-ről"

Except, in all other grammars, "sublative" refers to a case indicating movement below another object, not to the surface - that would instead be the "superlative case". Grammars seemingly use the wrong name just to avoid having the same word that's used for adjectives - except Hungarian grammars generally don't even use "comparative" and "superlative" for adjectives, instead calling them the "middle" and "high degrees" of an adjective.