[Cronos]

Does anyone know any of these languages?

From the Semitic: Hebrew, Arabic, AramaicFrom the Aryan-Slavic: Russian, Bulgarian, Polish, etc

From the Germanic: German, Frisian, Danish,etc?

I know the Slavic languages have genitive, but how do other languages use the genitive?

Since they're probably called something else in each language -- in Polish it's dopełniacz, so here's the English description

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-noun–main-noun relationships may include:

Depending on the language, specific varieties of genitive-noun–main-noun relationships may include:

• possession (see Possessive case):
  • inalienable possession ("Janet’s height", "Janet’s existence", "Janet’s long fingers")
  • alienable possession ("Janet’s jacket", "Janet’s drink")
  • relationship indicated by the noun being modified ("Janet’s 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:
  • as an agent ("She benefited from her father's love") – this is called the subjective genitive (Compare "Her father loved her", where Her father is the subject.)
  • as a patient ("the love of music")  – this is called the objective genitive (Compare "She loves music", where music is the object.)
• 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 noun’s 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.

[count-your-change]

” English does not have a proper genitive case, but a possessive ending, -’s (see below), although pronouns do have a genitive case.”

You’re overlooking Ebonics derived from Hoodslang and Drugfog idiomets. For example:

In the Neutral Tense....He be looking fresh as a poppy love.

In the Past Tense.......Dude be signifin’ and cut on his heavey, gonna be marked for wet.

In the Future Tense.....(Not much future for anyone who speaks such garbage.)

Yes, yes, glad to help out and all that.

[maryz]

English does not have a proper genitive case, but a possessive ending, -’s

Um, that is the genitive in English: the "s" is the remnant of a common genitive ending in Old English (OE); the apostrophe replaces the vowel preceding -- different vowels for different declensions. The case system was falling apart in OE by the time it began to be written. I think that "subjective, possessive, objective" case thing we learned in grammar school was slapped together for schoolchildren, like that weird "long a/short a", etc., that has nothing to do with actual vowel length. The dative survives in the "indirect object" (lately referred to as the bizarre "double direct") and in such constructions as "the more, the merrier."

Hebrew doesn't have cases, though it apparently used to (Classical Arabic -- as opposed to the various national Arabics -- is generally considered to preserve many of the features of proto-Semitic and it, of course, has a nominative, genitive and accusative); Hebrew does have a couple of words that preserve a locative (ha-bayta, "(to) home", and Yerushalmah, "to Jerusalem."

Good discussion here of the various uses of the Latin genitive.

[maryz]

I forgot to say that Old English -- like Greek (I believe) -- had a genitive absolute (today called "nominative absolute" IIRC), as opposed to the Latin ablative absolute. For those who forget, the absolute construction is a structure like "The hour being late, we left" -- the absolute construction in italics.

[maryz]

Another addition — in OE, the genitive could be used adverbially. This survives in the expression (old-fashioned, but still current in the early 20th century) “must needs.”