English Translation
My car is out of gas.
Shouldn’t it be "kifogyott a kocsim a benzinből’?
I’m also a learner, so please feel free to correct me if anyone knows better.
My understanding of fogy is to decrease or diminish, and so kifogy means to deplete.
It can be used directly with the substance that’s being depleted:
- Kifogyott a tej → The milk has run out
- Kifogyott a benzin → The petrol has run out
But it can also be used with the container or person too, in which case you’d use the elative to say what it’s running out of. Like:
- A bolt kifogyott a kenyérből → The shop is out of bread
- Kifogytam a pénzből → I am out money
We have similar constructions in English where it’s used to describe the substance or the container too, like the word to leak in “water is leaking from the bottle” vs “the bottle is leaking water”.
So with that in mind, the original sentence “kifogyott a kocsimból a benzin” uses the elative in a much more ‘physical’ sense. It’s saying the gas has run out from the car. On the other hand, “kifogyott a kocsim a benzinből” is saying that the car has run out of gas. They sound pretty much the same, and I don’t know which is more common, but I’m tempted to trust that the tatoeba sentences tend to word things more naturally in general.
I would appreciate it if some could verify that this is natural, but perhaps one way to illustrate the ‘physical’ vs the idiomatic elative would be like “kifogytam a pénzből a tárcámból” → I ran out of money from my wallet.