From: connolly@memstvx1.memst.edu
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: Re: Morphological development of the genitive case in German
Date: 11 Jan 93 09:03:44 -0600
Organization: Memphis State University

In article <memo.854868@cix.compulink.co.uk>, petex@cix.compulink.co.uk (Peter Christian) writes:
> In-Reply-To: <memo.852141@cix.compulink.co.uk> petex@cix.compulink.co.uk (Peter Christian)
> 
>> > If masculine and neuter nouns change their ending in the genitive as -es, as in
>> > die Mutter meines Vaters, and feminine nouns don't have the -es ending, as in
>> > der Vater meiner Mutter, why when making compound nouns with feminine nouns is
>> > there sometimes something like die VergangenheitSbewaeltigung?  Notice the
>> > genitive 's' there, I would conjecture that it follows from a pronunciation
>> > rule,
>> 
>> I don't *know* the answer to this but I can think of two
>> non-exclusive answers. 1) The point you suggest about pronunciation (not
>> a rule, though, it's too irregular for that), i.e. to ease the
>> transition between two consonants. 2) But initially probably the analogy
>> of the masc. & neuters where people must have come to regard it as a
>> compounding feature rather than as a reflex of the genitive. It would
>> certainly be interesting to find the earliest example of this -s-
>> with a feminine.
> 
> A fuller version of the latter hypothesis:
> 
> Originally it was possible for the genitive to precede the headword,
> as in Des Kaben Wunderhorn, Des Teufels General etc. And the compound
> with a masc. or neut. determinative derived its -s- from this
> genitive. However, once the syntactical rule changed and the genitive
> could only follow the head, the case function of the -s- was obscured
> and it was taken to be a feature of compounding in general and thus
> transferable to feminines.

There is a problem here: in German compounding, masculines and neuters
generally do not add -s, though some do.  Conversely, while many femi-
nines do add -s, many others do not: nouns in -e more usually add
-n or else drop the -e.

And a second problem: genitives can still precede nouns in German, as
the second example above proves (it's the title of a play written after
the Second World War).  Also, while genitives of common nouns are rarely
preposed, personal names normally are (postposing is literary and pom-
pous, requires a genitive article, and is now done without the -s).

	Normal: das Haus meines Vaters  'my father's house'
	        Herrn Meyers Haus  'Mr. Meyer's house'

	Exceptional:  meines Vaters Haus
	              das Haus des Herrn Meyer
                        
Nevertheless: it seems clear that the *only* source of -s in compounds
is the genitive ending.  I'm supposed to *know* when the darned thing
developed, but I'm afraid I don't.  Neither can I say why it is parti-
cularly common with feminines, even though in the whole history of the
German language, the feminine genitive has *never* had -s.  Old High
German rarely, if ever, attaches -s to feminines in compounds; one finds
instead explicit genitive forms (without -s, of course).

A final mystery is why *all* German feminines lack genitive -s.  In Indo-
European, the morphology of masculine and feminine i-stems was identical,
and had -s,
as may readily be seen by looking at Greek and Latin.  But in Old High 
German they're different for some reason.  To wit:

			Masc.		Fem.
	Nom. Sing.	gast 'guest'	anst 'favor'
	Gen. Sing.	gastes		ensti
	Nom. Plural	gesti		ensti

Somehow -s survived in the masculine, but not in the feminine.  Apparently
the patterning of *other* masc. resp. fem. categories is to blame.

--Leo Connolly