Genitive case

The genitive case (Classical Greek and Modern Greek: ɣενική; Latin: Genetivus; also called the second case) is a case of nouns that indicates that a noun is a nominal complement of another. Normally the relationship "(the) X of Y" is expressed in languages that have a genitive case as "(the) X Y*", where the asterisk * indicates that the word representing Y has a special ending or carries a specific morpheme indicating that it has a genitive case.

The genitive is also referred to as the possessive, although it should not be confused with the possessive case, due to its current use to denote that relationship. However, this second denomination falls short, since the genitive not only covers possession relationships, but also many others such as 'material it is made of', 'object related to'... Example: Polish is a genitive language, so "dobrej szafy" ('of good closet').

In German, in the nominative case, "Der Mann ist gross" means "Man is great, but in the genitive ("Das ist der Hund des Mannes", meaning &# 34;Ese es el perro del hombre"), both the article and the noun are declined to indicate the case. In any case, in the spoken language this case is used less and less; in many dialects it is frequently replaced by "von + dative" (Der Hund von Mann) or even by the construction "dem Mann sein Hund".

Many languages have the genitive case, including: Albanian, German, Arabic, Armenian, Kannada, Czech, Estonian, Basque, Finnish, Scottish Gaelic, Georgian, Greek, Gothic, Hungarian, Irish, Icelandic, Latin, Latvian, Lithuanian, Romanian, Sanskrit, Swedish, Tamil, Telugu, Turkish and all Slavic languages except Bulgarian and Macedonian.

Latin

In Latin, you have forms like filius amici '(the) son of the friend' or amicus filii '(the) friend of the son' (note that the words filius 'son' and amicus 'friend' take different forms in each of the two phrases).

Saxon genitive case

The Saxon genitive is an English and German grammatical construction, used to denote "possessor," as in William's brother came yesterday (German: Wilhelms Bruder kam gestern: 'Wilhelm's brother came yesterday'). This genitive construction constitutes one of the few "inflectional" of Old English that remain in the modern language. Today, many linguists deny that the Saxon genitive is a case, and Leonard Bloomfield, in his book Language (1935, pp.203-6), classifies it as one more determiner, in the same way. way as the other possessives (my, your, his,...).