genitivu

Genitivu, or the genitive case, is a grammatical category used in many languages to mark a relationship between nouns. Its name comes from Latin genitivus. The genitive is commonly used to express possession or association, but it can also indicate origin, material, measurement, or part-whole relationships. In languages with a synthetic genitive, the noun or its determiner changes form to show the case; in languages without a dedicated genitive, possession is often expressed with prepositional phrases or other constructions.

Functions of the genitive include possession (the book's cover), origin or source (the wooden door of the house), description (a day's work), and part-whole relationships (the pages of the book). The exact range of uses varies by language, and some meanings may be expressed more naturally by different constructions in a given language.

Forms and manifestations vary widely across languages. In languages with a synthetic genitive, nouns and adjectives may take specific endings or articles to signal the genitive. In English, possession is typically shown by the suffix -'s (the book's cover) or by a prepositional phrase (the cover of the book). German marks possession with a genitive article such as des, der, or des Vaters (the father's house). Latin expresses genitive relations through noun endings, as in liber pueri (the boy's book). In many other languages, the genitive is realized with suffixes or postpositional phrases rather than explicit prepositions.

The genitive remains a central tool for indicating relationships between nouns, helping to clarify ownership, origin, and part-whole connections in sentence structure.