Talk:Genitive case
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I'm not a professional or amateur linguist - I am a humanist who uses and has taught langauges (I taught high school Latin for 8 years). None of these case descriptions is general enough to pass muster. The PRIMARY function of words in the genitive case is possession. There are other uses of the genitive. Lots of them.
I recognize that this is just a start. In the long run I think the case entries should be edited by a linguist or philologist - at the very least we need a reasonably complete description of case in Indo European, and that doesn't complete the essay. Then they could be linked from target languages. The description of the cases in specific languages should be in that language entry or (heaven forfend) on a subpage (English/Possession; Old English/Genitive Case). --MichaelTinkler
What is the etymology of english's 's ? FvdP
An adjectival form?
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)
Is there someone with more liguistic expertise than me who would be willing to re-write the explanation of why we have -'s instead of -es? The definition now makes it sound like it's a spelling change and not a sound change, but I don't know how to rewrite it. --UnDeadGoat
Extraneous material
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)
