Vonalával

Vonalával is a Hungarian inflected form built from the noun vonal (line). It functions as an instrumental construction meaning “with its line” or “by means of its line.” The form is a bound morpheme, not a standalone word, and it encodes both possession (third person singular) and instrument in one sequence.

Formation and morphology: The base vonal takes the third-person possessive suffix -a (or -ja after certain phonological conditions), yielding vonala as the possessed form “its line.” To express instrument, the instrumental suffix -val (or -vel) is attached, producing vonalával. Orthography and pronunciation follow general Hungarian vowel harmony and assimilation rules, so the final shape reflects both the possessive and instrumental layers in a single word.

Usage and register: Vonalával is typically encountered in formal, descriptive, or technical Hungarian, such as academic, cartographic, or analytical writing, where the author wants to specify an action performed with the line belonging to something. It is comparatively rare in everyday speech, where simpler forms or alternative constructions would often be used.

Relation to related forms: Vonalával illustrates how Hungarian can combine possession with instrumental meaning in a single word, via the sequence root + possessive suffix + instrumental suffix. The process is analogous to other noun stems, and similar constructions can be formed with different base nouns by applying the same possessive and instrumental affixes.

See also: Hungarian grammar, instrumental case, possessive suffixes, -val/-vel.