archaïschegenitief

Archaïsche genitief is a term used in historical linguistics to describe the genitive case as it appeared in older stages of Germanic languages (and related languages) to mark possession. It refers to inflected forms attached to the possessor noun or to determiner phrases that signal ownership, rather than the modern, postposed prepositions or fixed possessive constructions. In many descriptions, the archaic genitive coexists with other ways of expressing possession, such as periphrastic constructions using a preposition.

In practice, archaïsche genitief involves endings on the noun or determiner that indicate genitive meaning. In Old and Middle Germanic languages, as well as in historical Dutch and English, these forms could appear as suffixes on the possessor noun or as a set of determiner forms like des, der, des in combination with the possessed noun. For example, similar functions are seen in German des Mannes Haus or English the man’s house, where the genitive relation is encoded by a form attached to the possessor or by an associated article in earlier stages of the language.

The use of the archaic genitive declined over time as prepositional expressions such as "of" or "van" became dominant in Dutch and English, and as simplified possessive constructions spread. In contemporary languages, the archaic genitive survives mainly in historical texts, scholarly descriptions, and fixed phrases, with the modern language relying primarily on prepositional phrases or possessive suffixes in specific contexts.

For linguists, the archaïsche genitief provides insight into the inflectional history and the development of possession marking, illustrating how languages transition from inflected possessive forms to more analytic structures.