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The genitive case is an adjectival form of a noun that shows some sort of relationship between itself and what it describes. In a general sense, this genitive relationship may be thought of as one thing belonging to, being created from, or otherwise deriving from some other thing.
Specific varieties of genitive relationships include:
The last two relationships are the most commonly expressed by the genitive.
Several languages have genitive cases, including Arabic, Latin, Irish, Greek, German, Dutch, Russian, Finnish and Sanskrit.
It is a common misconception that English nouns have a genitive case, marked by the possessive -'s ending. Linguists generally believe that English possessive is no longer a case at all, but has become a cliticIn linguistics, a clitic is a morpheme that functions syntactically like a word, but does not appear as an independent phonological word; instead it is always attached to a following or preceding word. A clitic is either an enclitic where the clitic is wi, an independent particleGrammatical particles are function words that are always uninflected, in that they neither adopt affixes, nor change their vowels or consonants, however much the rest of the words within the sentence are subject to normal inflection. Particles as function which, however, is always written and pronounced as part of the preceding word. This can be shown by the following example: 'The King of Sparta's wife was called Helen.'. If the English -'s were a genitive, then the wife would belong to Sparta; but the -'s attaches not to the word 'Sparta', but to the entire phrase 'King of Sparta'.
That is not to say that the English possessive did not have its origins as a genitive case; but it has developed into being a clitic instead. In Old EnglishOld English (also called Anglo-Saxon is an early form of the English language which was spoken in England around the year 1000. It is a West Germanic language, and is therefore similar to Frisian and Old Saxon. It is also quite similar to Old Norse (and,, a common singular genitive ending was -es. The 18th century17th century 18th century 19th century more centuries) As a means of recording the passage of time, the 18th century refers to the century that lasted from 1701- 1800; however, historians will sometimes specifically refer to the 18th Century as 1715- 89, explanation that the apostrophe might replace a genitive pronoun, as in "the king's horse" being a shortened form of 'the king, his horse', is erroneous. Rather, the apostrophe is replacing the 'e' from the Old EnglishOld English (also called Anglo-Saxon is an early form of the English language which was spoken in England around the year 1000. It is a West Germanic language, and is therefore similar to Frisian and Old Saxon. It is also quite similar to Old Norse (and, morphologyMorphology is a subdiscipline of linguistics that studies word structure. Words are at the interface between phonology, syntax and semantics (Spencer / Zwicky). There are many current approaches to morphology. For expository purposes, this article will de.
A few remnants of the genitive case do remain in Modern EnglishModern English is the term used for the contemporary use of the English language. In terms of historical linguistics, it covers the English language after the Middle English period; that is, roughly, after the Great Vowel Shift, which was largely conclude in a few pronounIn linguistics and grammar, a pronoun is a word that usually takes the place of a noun previously mentioned, such as "I", "me", "she", "it", and so on. Pronouns are one of the basic parts of speech, along with nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs. A prons as whose, the genitive form of who; likewise, my/mine, his/hers/its, our/ours, their/theirs. See also Declension in English.
In some languages, genitive nouns agree in case with the nouns they modify. This phenomenon is called suffixaufnahme.
One form in which genitive cases may be found is inclusio.
In astronomy, it is important to know the genitive form of the Latin names of constellations, because these are used along with letters of the Greek alphabet to name stars. For example, since the genitive of Gemini is Geminorum, the star Castor, brightest in the constellation Gemini, is named α Geminorum. For more details, see Bayer designation.
Grammatical cases