Talk:Genitive case

message: "She benefited from her father's love" - "[She benefited from] Janet's husband".
These are presented as completely different constructions. Formally, they are identical.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 92.2.219.140 (talk) 11:29, 3 May 2014 (UTC)
thread_title:  "Participation in an action" 

message: According to the article, the genitive today is present only in Arabic. I am not a linguist, but I am confused. What is the Hebrew construct סמיכות if not genitive? For example, isha is "woman" or "wife", ish is "man", and eshet ish is "a man's wife". Tzurah is "form", adam is "man[kind]", and tzurat ha-adam is "man's form" or "the form of a man". 
The Akkadian example, aššat šarrim ("wife of king" = "king's wife") would in fact be perfectly comprehensible in Modern Hebrew, except that it would perhaps mean the wife of a government official rather than of a king, but the gist (and its grammatical form) would be perfectly comprehensible in Hebrew, even though the phrase is Akkadian!
So how is genitive today present only in Arabic, and not in Hebrew? (And perhaps in other Semitic languages which I don't know personally, such as Aramaic in Kurdistan or Amharic in Ethiopia, etc.?)  Sevendust62 (talk) 15:50, 9 December 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: I know little about grammar of the Semitic languages, but your examples seem strange to me to be examples of the genitive case: if 'eshet' is the inflected form of 'woman' and 'ish' is the uninflected form of man, then the construction is: "woman-his man", and is not an example of genitive but an example of a possessive substantive ending. If it was a genitive then 'man' should be inflected, not 'woman'.
--Jidu Boite (talk) 07:49, 11 July 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  Semitic languages 

message: (inserted for readability ... said: Rursus (mbork³) 17:29, 26 October 2009 (UTC)
thread_title: (random heading)

message: The article begins "The genitive case is an adjectival form of a noun". Surely this is incorrect - an adjectival form of a noun would be an adjective, no? I presume the point being made is that a noun in the genitive case will often describe another noun, but that does not make it "adjectival". In addition, adjectives and pronouns can also be in the genitive case, so the genitive case (or any other case) is more than a form of the noun.
Unless anyone is able to convince me from a position of knowledge that this is a reasonable description of the genitive then I'm looking to re-write the first para in the near future. Valiantis 23:29, 18 Dec 2004 (UTC)
thread_title:  An adjectival form? 

message: I don't think it's really necessary to have an explanation of astronomical notation in a linguistics article. The paragraphs about English -'s are very well, but also seem a bit out of place -- they should be a sub-article to English grammar at most. This page also definitely needs attention (examples). --Pablo D. Flores 17:57, 18 Apr 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Extraneous material

message: Her long fingers is given as a case of inalienable possession. Unlike her existence or her height, though, surely fingers can be removed, and thus alienable?  - 131.111.8.102 16:17, 2 June 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: But if you remove my fingers, you gain no benefit from the fact of having my fingers, only the benefit that I may no longer make use of those fingers. I think. UnDeadGoat 17:09, 13 June 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: And the finger's are still Janets, even if you have them floating in your jar. The qeustion Who's fingers are those? would still be answered with Janet's, even though she is no longer in possesion of those fingers. +Hexagon1 (t) 01:38, 16 July 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: And you can also remove her existence (by dropping an atom bomb on her or dissolving her in acid or killing her and letting her decompose, reducing her to chemicals or atomic particles) or you can remove her height (by giving her osteoporosis, or by chopping off part of her legs). So by a reductio ad absurdum, nothing is inalienably possessed, if we use the finger contention (that fingers are not inalienable, because they can be removed).Sevendust62 (talk) 15:55, 9 December 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Her long fingers? 

message: Regardless of the above debate about the viability of the genitive case in English, there is still the remnant found in the pronouns, as discussed at the end of the paragraph discussing that. I, however, have a question about that. Mine, hers, yours, and theirs are listed as being genitive forms of these pronouns, but I believe that their usage in English is more in keeping with the dative case, as seen in usages such as the "dative of possession" and the "dative of reference" (from Latin and ancient Greek and possibly other languages). The only times I believe that those pronouns are used are in phrases such as "the book is mine", which mirrors Latin's dative of possession and "'To which book are you referring?' 'Mine.'", which mirrors both languages dative of reference (ancient Greek is often taught as having a "dative of possession", but actual usage appears more often to resemble the dative of reference). Thoughts? KraDakar 01:55, 13 July 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: English Genitive Archaisms

message: Perhaps the Japanese の could be worked in there somewhere, it seems like a perfect example of a genitive case. PS: That's "no", in case you don't have Jap fonts installed. +Hexagon1 (t) 13:46, 14 July 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: の is an enclitic postposition, not a morphological case mark. See Talk:Japanese language#Japanese and cases for my answer to the same question. I think it's unwise to give so much emphasis to the English -'s marker in this article, and の falls into the same pattern. It all depends on what you call "case". —Pablo D. Flores (Talk) 14:06, 29 July 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I see. +Hexagon1 (t) 04:57, 30 July 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  の 

message: I may be wrong, but I believe there are more remnants of the genitive case from Old English in uses like "Physics class" or "Linguistics book"...  The "s" at the end is comparable to the apostrophe-s in English possessive, I believe, and not a plural form.  It's not like one studies more than one physic and reads about more than one linguistic.
:Hmmmm.  Neither physics nor linguistics are really good candidates for Old English survivals, in that both are learned Greco-Latin terms.  They are theoretically plural in form, but singular in construction: physics is hard, not *physics are hard.  Physic is a perfectly good word, but means something else.  Linguistic as a noun seems rarer, but it is possible it has been used in some senses such as Chomsky's linguistic; in this it could resemble dialectic / dialectics.  So physics book and so forth are simple attributive uses of ordinary nouns, parallel with astronomy book, not true genitives.  Smerdis of Tlön 14:53, 21 July 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: It's a bit late to answer the question, especially as the article doesn't seem to reflect any confusion about it, but the forms are plural, not possessive. The reason they are plural is that words like physics, mathematics, linguistics and many others were coined on the model of Greek neuter plurals 'ta phusika' etc, things relating to life etc. These are nominative in Greek, and were doubtless intended to be so in English. They also, despite being plural forms, take a singular verb in Greek, and this was and still is reflected in English usage. CIngram99 16:13, 1 November 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Other forms? 

message: It is ridiculous to say 'lots of languages have the genitive case' or the like. The gentive case has no existence outside of specific languages. It is not that a particular language has or doesn't have a case, but rather that things in particular languages are labelled 'genitive' in English. This Platonism should be avoided here and in all other articles.Tibetologist 06:28, 4 January 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Platonism

message: I dont think that there is any place for discussing english here as english is an UNDECLINED language it has no bearing on the topic at hand. Discussion of english should be left for an article about english grammar not a discussion about a gramar for that is not even present in english. Not to mention that it would be better to not even be discussing this in enlish but in a declined language because then it might make more sence to all you uni-lingual people out there.
Hali.schatz 19:34, 11 February 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Not present in english? How do you propose one would say 'wikipedia's article', or the 'this is the article of whom?' both require the use of the genitive case, and although it is true that in recent times people's use of the dative (and even in some cases the accusative!) has become increasingly sloppy, the use of the genitive can hardly drop out of usage! MHDIV ɪŋglɪʃnɜː(r)d(Suggestion?|wanna chat?) 22:10, 11 February 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Neither of those involve case. The former uses the possessive enclitic, while the latter involves a prepositional phrase. — Gwalla | Talk 03:28, 12 February 2007 (UTC)

text: Ok, I will give you the first time, but the second instance is in the gentive. It is 'whom', because the preposition 'of' triggers the genitive. MHDIV  ɪŋglɪʃnɜː(r)d(Suggestion?|wanna chat?) 18:08, 12 February 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Debatable. "Whom" is the accusative of "who", and prepositions govern the accusative in English. The closest thing to a genitive that English has is the first and second person possessive pronouns. — Gwalla | Talk 06:23, 13 February 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: The genitive/possessive of "who" is "whose", "whom" is the objective/prepositional/accusative form. It is incompetent to think that because "of" shows possession, what follows is in genitive. Eallik (talk) 02:44, 21 December 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  English?! (insert interrobang here) 

message: Enzedbrit recently made an edit to the article, changing "Confucius' teaching" to "Confucius's teaching", with the comment, Names that add in 's' still require "'s" (though I'm presuming he or she meant names that end in 's'). As far as I'm aware, there is no such hard and fast rule on this and that it is more common for people to use the form, "Confucius' teaching", on the basis that "Confucius's teaching" is unwieldy. In my opinion, it should stay as "Confucius' teaching". Any thoughts? -- Hux 06:26, 5 April 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  s' vs. s's 

message: First - should there be a note about the "appositive" use, as in "the city of Chicago"? This seems to be treated in traditional grammars.
Second - what about the "double possessive" in English? As in "this heart of mine". It seems to be rather puzzling.
TomS TDotO 11:43, 6 April 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  A couple of usages that are not mentioned 

message: @"de man zijn hand" - to me this sound very odd. Normally you'd say "de hand van de man", but even the very outdated "'s mans hand" sounds more normal somehow. Shinobu 21:25, 22 July 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Strange example 

message: I actually came here in the hope I'd find a link target for genetive of quality. Perhaps you can use this excellent Project Gutenberg text to improve the article. Thanks, Shinobu 21:28, 22 July 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Latin genetive, and terms thereof 

message: I suggest creating a separate article for 's since it's not a real case ending. Also, other articles refering to 's now point to Saxon genitive, but most of the information is here instead. The information from this article should at least be moved to the so called "main article" - Saxon Genitive. --V111P 10:48, 31 July 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Separate article for English -'s ending 

message: I believe that one could just as easily say "Sparta's king's wife" instead of "King of Sparta's wife", so that "wife" doesn't attach to "Sparta", so I don't think that this is good example. --Se Cyning 21:54, April 20 2008 (UTC)
:You can, but it's usually frowned upon in formal writing. You can replace "of" with the 's construction in most cases, but that hardly matters here. The point of the example is that the 's is phonologically attached to "Sparta", but grammatically modifies the entire phrase "King of Sparta", therefore it is a clitic. Using "Sparta's King's wife" would not demonstrate this, and would therefore be a poor example in this case. — Gwalla | Talk 19:51, 21 April 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  King of Sparta's Wife 

message: Which is proper "Tom, Dick and Harry's eyes were open." or "Tom's, Dick's and Harry's eyes were open."? TheHYPO (talk) 04:07, 17 June 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: I believe the former. It's an enclitic, so it attaches to the word at the end of the noun phrase. — Gwalla | Talk 15:57, 17 June 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: The latter is considered correct, since what is intended is "Tom's eyes and Dick's eyes and Harry's eyes were all open" -- that is, there are separate possessions. But if you said "Every Tom, Dick, and Harry's eyes were open", so that "Tom, Dick, and Harry" is a single concept meaning essentially "person", then the 's is attached once to the end of the noun phrase.  Duoduoduo (talk) 20:52, 6 July 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  Proper for multiple nouns? 

message: 1. Who object to the double genitive? It is really necessary to document the fact that a lot of people feel uncomfortable with this? It would strike me as being pedantic to mention Lowth "A Short Introduction to English Grammar" (1762), Lindsley Murray "English Grammar ..." (1795), and some modern language mavens, when we all know that there are people who advise against this usage. Maybe even snide to mention a modern "expert", only to show that he doesn't know what he is talking about? Would it be OK just to reword it to something like "Although the usage is, at first glance, ungrammatical..."? (I got those two references from "Merriam Webster's Dictionary of English Usage", by the way. Not that I'm in the habit of browsing through 18th century English grammars.)
2. Thanks for the additional online reference for the usage. But the example is a duplicate of the "portrait of the king's" example given just prior. One or the other should be deleted. I don't care which, and I'll leave it up to you.
TomS TDotO (talk) 13:33, 21 November 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Double genitive 

message: I think I'm going to change some of this later, when I have time, unless someone can give me reason not to.  It seems as though few languages are represented as having a genitive, even though there are many (post all germanic languages keep it, for example.)  The setup of the article is really hard to read and when a reader is coming to find information quickly, this article is absolutely useless on that front.  I came to look for something regarding finnish genitive vs. partitive, and while reading the first part, I was completely distracted by the "some languages do..." language.  This article is not definitive, and if anything misleading.  It doesn't give a whole lot of real information that can be further looked into.  I like to use Wikipedia as a stepping stone to find some real sources, but this is just not what I expected.
I hope to help with the effort.
134.93.59.195 (talk) 16:23, 17 January 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Disgraceful article... 

message: Ajd has replaced "English my is either a separate possessive adjective or an irregular genitive of I" with "English my is either a separate possessive determiner or an irregular genitive of I", giving the edit summary "(determiner, not adjective)". The reason for the introduction of the expression "possessive determiner" was precisely to avoid having to tie oneself down to the adjective or to the genitive interpretation: the whole point of this sentence is to draw attention to the dual interpretation, and so the substitution made here destroys the meaning of the sentence. Hence I have reverted it. JamesBWatson (talk) 16:49, 19 May 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Possessive adjective/ determiner 

message: 68.222.10.27 has given some additional examples supposedly of the subjective genitive. I must admit that I don't understand the explanation given, and I suspect that these are really examples of the appositive use of "of". Could someone clarify this for me? I am tempted to revert this. TomS TDotO (talk) 18:12, 27 June 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: TomS TDotO is absolutely right: they are not subjective genitives, so I have reverted them. JamesBWatson (talk) 20:41, 29 June 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Subjective genitive 

message: Bubkes! Astronomy is not a language! Astronomy peruses Latin for the constellation names, so there is no reason to treat astronomy as a language(!). Therefore: there should not be such a loony section as Genitive in astronomy. ... said: Rursus (mbork³) 17:34, 26 October 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: The Latin genitive is used in astronomy, so it seems to me entirely appropriate to have a section mentioning the fact. I have read the relevant section, and I do not see that it "treats astronomy as a language". Even if you disagree, describing the section as "loony" is not constructive. JamesBWatson (talk) 11:53, 28 October 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: It's used in anythign that uses Latin. There's nothing particularly special about astronomy in this regard. At best it'd be a paragraph in a section on the Latin genitive. — Gwalla | Talk 18:02, 29 October 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: Yes, I agree with that, and I have rewritten the section accordingly. JamesBWatson (talk) 11:15, 30 October 2009 (UTC)
thread_title: Genitive in "astronomy"

message: This article was moved from Genitive case to Genitive because there is no other use of the term "genitive" from which the grammatical case must be disambiguated.
But it seems that the same reasoning would apply to most of the other articles on grammatical cases. What other uses of the terms accusative and dative, for example, are there? For consistency's sake, we must move all the articles for unambiguously named cases. To determine which are unambiguous, we must evaluate all the 63 grammatical case article names that end in case, an awful lot of work.
Unless anyone wants to go to all the work, I think we should abandon the reasoning that led to the move, and stick with the format X case for all grammatical case articles, including Genitive case. — Eru·tuon 20:13, 5 December 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  Genitive or Genitive case? 

message: in the article it is stated that the genitive of negation, while obligatory in many Slavic languages is considered archaic in Czech and Serbo-Croatian. I don't know about Czech, but as a native speaker of Serbo-Croatian (more specifically the Croatian standardization) I know that genitive of negation is everything but archaic in this language. Consider the sentences:
'Nema problema.' ('There is no problem'), problemA is the genitive of problem. 
'Nemamo novca(G).' 'we don't have any money(G)'
'Bez oblaka(G) nema kiše(G).' 'Without clouds (G) there is no rain (G)'
I honestly don't know any other meaningful way of building these sentences in SC. The example given in the text for Russian ('Maria is not at home') can be built with or without the use of genitive. I don't know about the other standardizations, but at least in the Croatian version, neither option is archaic.
'MarijE (G) nema doma' ('there is no Marija (G) at home')
'Marija (N) nije doma' ('Marija (N) is not home')  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 87.163.45.180 (talk) 22:00, 29 April 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  Negation Genitive in Serbo-Croatian 

message: esse texto tá mt ruim. tem coisas que nem tem senso!!!  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 189.46.50.166 (talk) 11:39, 8 October 2012 (UTC)
thread_title:  ruim de mais 

message: The section on the Irish genitive as it stands now is not only overly simplistic, but downright wrong in some aspects (it claims that the genitive is “not often seen”, which is about as far from the truth as you can get)—and half the examples are not well-formed within Irish grammar.
It also completely fails to mention that one of the most widespread uses of the genitive in Irish is to mark the object of a verb in a progressive tense (syntactically made up of a copula + preposition + verbal noun + object of verb in the genitive = ‘at the X’ing of Y’).
I don’t have the time to run through it, unfortunately, but someone definitely should! Kokoshneta (talk) 15:49, 5 May 2013 (UTC)
replies: text: I don't have the expertise to do anything with it either, but I tagged it with a "misleading" template for now. Victor Yus (talk) 07:02, 6 May 2013 (UTC)
thread_title:  Irish genitive 

message: I'm fairly certain Persian (Farsi), despite sharing a writing system with Arabic, is primarily Indo-European, not Semitic in origin. I'd assume any Semitic influence would be in the form of loanwords only, not morphology. Accordingly, why is it in the Semitic category here?  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 128.227.37.95 (talk) 14:34, 7 March 2014 (UTC)
thread_title:  Persian a Semitic Language? 

message: Hello fellow Wikipedians,
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thread_title:  External links modified 

message: My attention was called to the section on Slavic languages by a recent edit. I have only a slight knowledge of Slavic languages, but it seems to me that there should be some work on this. If nothing else, there should be a better example than "Irina has dinner", for, at least in English, this can mean something other than possession: It can mean Irina is eating, or that Irina is having guests for the meal. "U Irini karandash" would ordinarily mean simply "Irina has a pencil", not "At Irina's there is a pencil", so it seems to me. But I am not a Slavic expert, so it would be outrageous for me to attempt a rewrite.   TomS TDotO (talk) 17:32, 10 June 2016 (UTC)
thread_title:  Slavic 

message: I saw this section: 
"For example, Juhani Virtanen can be also expressed Virtasen Juhani ("Juhani of the Virtanens")."
Is there a spelling error here? Is "Virtanen" the same as "Virtasen"? Any Finnish speakers who can clarify?
: I'm not an expert, but I have studied some Finnish and this looks like an error. I think it should be Virtanen in both examples. - 51.149.249.35 (talk) 13:34, 24 October 2022 (UTC)
thread_title:  Finnish example: spelling 

message: I’m not a prescriptivist so although I’m willing to consider this claim in the article to be true, as a native English speaker (central Saskatchewan, Canada) this example sounds completely natural and acceptable. In formal writing, it would sound imprecise and rushed, and in conversation it might stand out amongst highly literate audiences, but this is a construction I’ve encountered all my life without a second thought until now. (FWIW) Devvyn (talk) 18:33, 25 August 2019 (UTC)
thread_title:  “The horse in second place’s chance” is unacceptable 

message: Regarding the text "the genitive construction "pack of dogs" is similar, but not identical in meaning to the possessive case "dogs' pack" (and neither of these is entirely interchangeable with "dog pack", which is neither genitive nor possessive).", what are these differences? I'm a published author and wouldn't know myself... --ExperiencedArticleFixer (talk) 13:13, 18 June 2020 (UTC)
thread_title:  Differences en meaning. 

message: I've edited the Hungarian section, as the previous content was flat out incorrect. I did not go into much detail in my edit, and I only focused on correcting the most obvious flaws, so further edits by someone more experienced in Wikipedia than me would be welcome. The below might help.
The previous version stated that the genitive is formed using the "-é" or "-e" suffix depending on vowel harmony. Anyone with a basic knowledge in Hungarian knows that in terms of vowel harmony, there is no difference between those two vowels: "é" is the long version of "e", and they're both back/high vowels. It's enough to look at the examples listed by the previous version (which I've kept, as they're not bad examples) to see that the difference between the "-é" and "-e" suffixes is that one is used to mark an owner/possessor ("madáré", "bird's") while the other marks the ownee/possessed object ("csőre", "its beak").
Of the two suffixes, "-é" can be used with every word regardless of vowel harmony. "-e" alternates with "-a", depending on whether the word it is used with has back or front vowels. Also note that "-e" and "-a" are only the third person singular forms of the suffix, and even then they change to "-je" or "-ja" when joined to certain words. The Hungarian Wikipedia article Birtokos személyjel (Possessive affix) has a nice long table with all the possible forms it can take.
One would not use the two suffixes together: in a normal possessive construct such as "madár csőre" ('bird's beak'), only the "-e" suffix is used to mark the possessed object, the possessor is left in the nominative (although the dative "-nak"/"-nek" can also be used). If the possessor is the predicate of the sentence, it is marked with the "-é" suffix and the possessed object is left in the nominative ("a csőr a madáré", "the beak is the bird's"). I've added this last sentence as another example to illustrate the difference.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2A01:36D:112:664F:29EA:F080:D7F9:4A8E (talk) 16:24, 9 August 2020 (UTC)
thread_title:  Hungarian genitive 

message: This alludes to an Old English example, but doesn't quote any specific one. Would that be þǣre englalandes cwēne clāþ? If so, this is a poor example: the word order changed, and cwēn doesn't take an -s ending, but englaland does, superficially eliminating the difference from Modern English which the example is supposed to show. How about we change the example to e.g. the cat in the hat's tricks and (presumably) þæs cattes in þām hætte wundru to match both the word order and the endings?  --2A00:A040:19F:D2F0:E50F:E0AA:3CF2:EB60 (talk) 20:15, 31 December 2021 (UTC)
thread_title:  Old English example