(I hate to ask such a simple question but I feel that here I can ‘display my ignorance’ and not get too beat up for it, so here goes.)
My observation is that there is a subset of prepostions which are used w/ the ablative case and the rest are used in prepostional phrases.
I am looking for a complete list of the types of ablative cases, eg. accompainment, cause, etc., and their details. Does anyone have one/know of such a list?
Thanks,
dlb
.
Surely any grammar has that? I mean if I open mine I see stuff listed like the ablative of cause, accompaniment, measure of difference etc etc. I’m sure the downloadable grammars we have here will have them too.
Salve dlb
Vide hoc: http://www.hhhh.org/perseant/libellus/aides/allgre/allgre.contents.html
And as may you hear a lot around here, before you rush off to memorize that list of Ablatives, just remember that they’re all just ablatives. Philologists have deduced these various categories, but you can read the Latin without knowing them.
Ut indigenae saepe dicunt, priusquam formulam verborum ablativorum discendo vadis, memento omnia solum ablativa sunt. Philologistae hunc seriem instruxerunt, sed tibi clare licet sine eis discendis Latine legere.
Thanks for doing the ground work. Now all I have to do is fill in the details & I can get started on learning them.
dlb
.
But can a philologist? 
Ablatives are my latest memorization project 
but I hear that they keep the arteries clear and the dendrites firing!
Thanks,
dlb
.
Indeed, it was absolutely heart breaking for me, when I opened the exam, to find that I could read the passages with ease (in fact I managed to translate them within 10 minutes) and rapidly parse what was required (there was some confusion with one word, subjunctive present or future indicative???) yet when asked various syntax questions I came close to screaming.
Alas my teacher is a huge fan of such questions. 
Found in A&G under the heading, “Ablative of Specification.”
NOTE: As the Romans bad no such categories as we make, it is impossible Classify all uses of the ablative.
This does not sound promising!
Don’t be too hard on the grammarians, though. Imagine if you had to list all the uses of highly polysemous prepositions in English, like “of” or “to”. For me it was easier to learn the broad usages and then pick up the details through reading (that’s still a work in progress). And there are many cases where people will not disagree on the meaning but will disagree on the classification.
I prefer to just think of the ablative as “everything that isn’t governed by the other cases”. That way, everything falls neatly into “ablative of not nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, vocative, or locative”. 
I usually think of the ablative in terms of the prepositions or prepositional senses that go along with it.
Generally five prepositions seem to cover most usages: “from” “out of” “by” with", and (nonaccusative) “in”.
Just as A&G, thesaurus and modus.irrealis say. Since the categories are imposed descriptions on the language, names of the ablatives categories can occasionally vary between and within authors and (to a certain extent) over time. Boundaries between categories can be a later vague sometimes, and one may come across, not disagreements, but classifications of particular uses as “like this and/or like that category of ablative”.
Ut dicunt A&G, thesaurus, modus.irrealis. Quòd imponuntur genera casûs ablativi in linguam, diversificari ferè per tempora certè inter et intra grammaticos nomina ab grammaticis imposita possunt. Nebulosi nonnunquàm fines inter genera, adeò non ex dissentione sed elisione evenit usum quendam eodem tempore multiplicia in genera innumerari.