Genitiivne

Genitiivne, commonly known as the genitive, is a grammatical concept used in many languages to mark a noun as belonging to or relating to another noun. It is a distinct case in languages that inflect nouns, adjectives, or determiners, and it often signals possession, close association, or part-whole relationships.

The primary functions of the genitive include expressing possession (the owner's object), attribution or relation (a friend's car, the city's hall), and various dependent relations such as origin, material, or measurement. It can also be used after numerals in some languages to indicate quantities and in compound expressions that describe a noun phrase more precisely.

Morphology of the genitive varies widely. In some languages, nouns take specific endings to show the genitive singular and plural, with endings changing according to gender, number, and declension class. In other languages, possession or related meanings are expressed with prepositions or particle phrases rather than a fixed noun ending. English, by contrast, primarily uses a possessive suffix ('s) or a prepositional form with of to convey genitive meaning, rather than a full case system on nouns.

In Estonian, the genitive is called genitiivne and is used to express possession and other close relations. The form changes with the noun’s stem and number, and it plays a central role in linking nouns within noun phrases to convey ownership or attribution. Across languages, the genitive remains a versatile tool for indicating how nouns are interconnected within a sentence.