BOUGHAll pronounced differently! And then why does mass have two 's" and Christmas only one? Ditto for full and joyful?
TOUGH
COUGH
Genitive
In grammar, genitive (abbreviated gen; also called the possessive case or second case) is the grammatical case that marks a noun as modifying another noun. It often marks a noun as being the possessor of another noun but it can also indicate various relationships other than possession; certain verbs may take arguments in the genitive case; and it may have adverbial uses (see Adverbial genitive). Modern English does not typically mark nouns for a genitive case morphologically rather, it uses the 's clitic or a preposition (usually of) but the personal pronouns do have distinct possessive forms. In many Afroasiatic languages the construct state is used to express similar relations between nouns.
Depending on the language, specific varieties of genitive-nounmain-noun relationships may include:Depending on the language, specific varieties of genitive-nounmain-noun relationships may include:
- possession (see Possessive case):
- inalienable possession ("Janets height", "Janets existence", "Janets long fingers")
- alienable possession ("Janets jacket", "Janets drink")
- relationship indicated by the noun being modified ("Janets husband")
- composition (see Partitive case):
- substance ("a wheel of cheese")
- elements ("a group of men")
- source ("a portion of the food")
- participation in an action:
- origin ("men of Rome")
- reference ("the capital of the Republic" or "the Republic's capital")
- description ("man of honour", "day of reckoning")
- compounds ("doomsday" ("doom's day"), Scottish Gaelic "ball coise" = "football", where "coise" = gen. of "cas", "foot")
Depending on the language, some of the relationships mentioned above have their own distinct cases different from the genitive.
Possessive pronouns are distinct pronouns, found in Indo-European languages such as English, that function like pronouns inflected in the genitive. They are considered separate pronouns if contrasting to languages where pronouns are regularly inflected in the genitive. For example, English my is either a separate possessive adjective or an irregular genitive of I, while in Finnish, for example, minun is regularly agglutinated from minu- "I" and -n (genitive).
In some languages, nouns in the genitive case also agree in case with the nouns they modify (that is, it is marked for two cases). This phenomenon is called suffixaufnahme.
In some languages, nouns in the genitive case may be found in inclusio that is, between the main nouns article and the noun itself.
Many languages have a genitive case, including Albanian, Arabic, Armenian, Basque, Czech, Slovak, Estonian, Finnish, Gaelic, Georgian, German, Greek, Icelandic, Irish, Latin, Latvian, Polish, Romanian, Russian, Sanskrit, Bosnian, Serbian, Croatian, Slovene, Turkish and Ukrainian. English does not have a proper genitive case, but a possessive ending, -s (see below), although pronouns do have a genitive case.