Talk:His genitive

message: There is an example for afrikaans in this article. My first language is afrikaans and people would rather say die man se kinders which translates to the man's children. The example might have been used in old afrikaans, I'm not sure, but it is definitely not standard as claimed by the article. - FredStrauss 10:05, 7 November 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Okay, sorry, I guess I misunderstood what I read about Afrikaans then. I confused the se (which is some sort of particle, I take it?) with the possessive pronoun sy. —Angr 10:30, 7 November 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I am a native Dutch speaker with some passive knowledge of Afrikaans. When I copyedited the article, I let the Afrikaans example stand as I thought it to be correct. It should, of course, be 'se' not 'sy', but correct me if I'm wrong, that's still a possessive pronoun cognate with Dutch 'zijn' (and so, the corrected example would still be valid)? -- Curt Woyte 11:49, 7 November 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I think you're right Curt, se could be considered a different form of sy. However, we do use sy, for example. This is his bike would be Dit is sy fiets. Die man se kinders just naturally translates better to The man's children for me, rather than The man his children, but I guess that's kind of the point the article is trying to make. I'm happy with the example as Die man se kinders. As a matter of interest, se is also used for the feminine form, as in Die vrou se kinders, which is The woman's children. Rather than using sy, you would use haar, like her, for example, Dit is haar fiets, which translates to This is her bike. - FredStrauss 06:08, 8 November 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I see! If I'm correct, then "sy" translates to "zijn" in Dutch and "se" to the Dutch enclitic, unstressed form "z'n" / "d'r" (which, incidentally, is pronounced "se" for the masculine version in many parts of the Netherlands). So it is a valid example; I shall re-include it. Thanks! -- Curt Woyte 08:58, 8 November 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Cool, I'm just going to change it to kinders, kinders is the plural and kind the singular. - FredStrauss 14:32, 8 November 2006 (UTC)
replies: text:  Perhaps it's worth noting that Afrikaans also uses s'n as well as se. I'm not sure what the grammatical term for the difference is, but while English uses -'s for constructions like Marie's book and This bike is Mary's, Afrikaans would use Marie se boek but Dié fiets is Marie s'n.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 77.102.254.132 (talk) 22:03, 7 December 2012 (UTC)
thread_title:  Afrikaans 

message: An Anglo-Saxon "his" genitive occurs occasionally, along with a "her" genitive and "their" genitive, but not as a widespread feature of syntax (Curme 71). This "his" genitive continued and developed in other Germanic languages, while it died out quickly in Old English. Therefore, although there are analogous "his" genitives in Old Norse descendants, the Old English "his" genitive is not the source of the early Modern English form.
:This reads as slightly confused to me. There is a "his genitive" in Norwegian, which is an Old Norse descendant, but the construction is not from Old Norse, which has no such thing. It came to Norwegian from Low German some centuries ago.
Arrgh!  You see, I originally had it as simply Germanic and Low German (e.g. in Dutch), but then all sorts of questions came in and changes, and so I backtracked.  Ah, well.  This is proving to be a pickle.  I cannot cite for this, so please feel free to change it.  Geogre 19:34, 7 November 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I wasn't aware of a "his genitive" in Old English - do you have any examples? Haukur 18:48, 7 November 2006 (UTC)

text: If you can be troubled I'd be interested. Haukur 19:51, 7 November 2006 (UTC)

text: "he his-genitive occurs occasionally in Old English: 'Enac his bearn' ( Numbers, XIII, 29) = 'Anak's sons.' In older English alongside of the his-genitive were a her-genitive and a theirgenitive: 'Mary her books,' 'the boys their books.' Also these genitive forms occur in Old English. The genitive with his, her, and their became common between 1500 and 1700: 'my lord his gracious letteres' ( Thomas Cromwell, Letter to Thomas Arondell, June 30, 1528); 'Mars his true moving' ( Shakespeare, I Henry VI, I, II, 1); ..."
The examples are somewhat few, and I think Curme was trying to say that it was brief.  Geogre 11:04, 8 November 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Old Norse and Old English mentions 

message: You know, folks, I hesitate to say it, but this is a pretty darned good article now.  What's more, it got that way through the wiki- process.  It isn't that often, after all, that a dozen hands contribute a piece at a time, sand and plane and clear and varnish together, and end up with a coherent, expressive, and scholarly whole, but it has happened here.  Of course, there might be new discoveries that will render all of it worthless, but it's...pretty good.  Congratulations and thanks to absolutely everyone.  Geogre 16:07, 21 November 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: A blooper: "Having only appeared around 1680, it was exceptionally rare by 1700." No. 1580 might have been intended. It was disappearing in 1680.  --Wetman 01:38, 5 July 2007 (UTC)

text: I would love to have the example and information that you provided, but not up in the lead, and not denying the thesis of the article.  I would rather that you weave it in in a more a propos spot, if you will.  Geogre 02:04, 5 July 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: A blooper, as I said: I have added a 1622 occurence, sourced, without fixing the erroneous "Having only appeared around 1680, it was exceptionally rare by 1700", since the idea seems to be liked. --Wetman 02:42, 6 October 2007 (UTC)

text: And you still want to come back and have your way.  The article discusses the regular formation, but the "his genitive" as a hypercorrection or replacement for the -s genitive is brief.  You should use the talk page, not edit summaries, to argue, and you should respect the text and not try to have your way despite it.  Geogre (talk) 10:19, 10 March 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Victory  her dance 

message: The term "his genitive" may refer either to marking genitives with "his" as a reflexive or intensifying marker or, much more precisely, the practice of using "his" instead of an -s.  
So is the use of the possessive apostrophe and indicator of the 'now lost' his gentive? For instance, in "The King's daughter" is the apostrophe replacing the "is" of "his"? I'm guessing not because we still have "The Queen's daughter" and not "The Queen'r daughter" (I assume there was a female equivalent)? Just wondering......--Joopercoopers 12:41, 5 July 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: A question

message: Whoa, the paragraph on German is very much anti-NPOV. As if it were right out of one of the polemic books of that Sick.
The construction is, in German, one of the rare cases of a grammatical feature that is found in all dialects of German, but not in the standard language. This ubiquity in German dialects is a solid sign that the feature is rooted deep in the language. --mach 🙈🙉🙊 22:02, 17 February 2014 (UTC)
thread_title:  German samples are very much the contrary of [[WP:NPOV]] 

message: Of course we're talking about a language that isn’t even Indo-European, let along Germanic, but it seems Turkish does something similar:
* kadın “woman”
* ev “house”
* kadının evi “woman’s house” ("woman-GEN house-3.SG.POSS", or lit. "a/the woman’s her house")
In other words, the possessor is marked in the genetive case and the possessee is marked with a possessive suffix. http://www.turkishlanguage.co.uk/possessiveforms.htm.
Azerbaijani has the same feature, but I don’t know about other Turkic languages. —LudwigVan (talk) 20:33, 5 July 2015 (UTC)
thread_title:  Turkish and Azerbaijani? 

message: I'd like to see the titular phrase styled consistently throughout the article (and the title)... but how should we do it?
* Bare (his genitive)
* Quotation marks ("his" genitive)
* Italics (his genitive)
Personally I prefer the third style, but the article uses a mix of the first and second at present. (The third style happens to be used in the Wiktionary entry for the Indonesian possessive marker -nya, which is how I ended up at this article today!) -- Perey (talk) 08:17, 17 September 2022 (UTC)
thread_title:  Styling the phrase 

message: I’ve noticed that books in English, even into the mid 18th century, often have signatures of original owners using the his genitive. I saw a book from the 18th century with a signature and ‘Thomas Reynolds his Book’ written on the inside, dated 1743. Is it possible the his genitive survived into the 18th century in this way? 38.15.254.90 (talk) 21:19, 30 December 2023 (UTC)
thread_title:  Use of the his genitive to indicate ownership of books