Genitiivi

Genitiivi, or the genitive case, is a grammatical category used in several languages to express a range of relations between nouns, most commonly possession or close association. It marks that one noun belongs to or is connected with another, as in the English phrase the color of the sky or the German Das Haus des Mannes (the man’s house).

Beyond possession, the genitive can express various relations such as origin, material, content, measurement, or part-whole relationships. The exact functions and scope of the genitive vary by language. In many Indo-European languages with rich case systems, the genitive is a distinct inflected form that changes with number and sometimes gender. In analytic languages, including English, possession is typically shown with possessive constructions (’s) or with prepositional phrases (of).

Morphology and syntax differ across languages. In Latin and German, the genitive is one of several noun cases and interacts with articles, adjectives, and word order. In Finnish and Estonian, genitive forms are created through suffixes attached to the dependent noun, indicating possession or related meaning without a separate article system.

Examples:

- Latin: libri pueri — “the boy’s books” (books of the boy)

- German: das Haus des Mannes — “the man’s house”

- English: the color of the sky or the man’s house

The genitive is a central device for forming noun-noun relationships and for encoding speakers’ conceptual links between entities, though its realization ranges from inflectional endings to prepositional or possessive constructions depending on the language.