The Saxon genitive is the traditional term used for the "'s" word-ending in the English language. The term is now infrequently used by linguists who argue that "'s" represents a possessive, not a genitive. And, moreover, many contend that "'s" now functions as a clitic rather than a case ending. The English language is a West Germanic language that originates in England. ... Possessive case is a case that exists in some languages used for possession. ... The genitive case is a grammatical case that indicates a relationship, primarily one of possession, between the noun in the genitive case and another noun. ... In linguistics, a clitic is a word that syntactically functions as a free morpheme, but phonetically appears as a bound morpheme; it is always pronounced with a following or preceding word. ...
Modern English forms the saxon genitive as follows:
Regular noun not ending in "s"
Regular noun ending in "s"
Irregular noun
Singular
's
's
's
Plural
s'
es'
's
Example (Singular)
cat's
class's
child's
Example (Plural)
cats'
classes'
children's
Pronouns do not combine with "'s" to form possesives; there are a range of Possessive pronouns used instead. A possessive pronoun is a part of speech that attributes ownership to someone or something. ...
In Old English nouns declined according to grammatical gender. The modern Saxon genitive is derived from the strong masculine genitive case of Old English. The plural forms are a relatively modern innovation, and are not derived from Old English. Old English (also called Anglo-Saxon) is an early form of the English language that was spoken in parts of what is now England and southern Scotland between the mid-fifth century and the mid-twelfth century. ... In linguistics, declension is a paradigm of inflected nouns. ... It has been suggested that natural gender be merged into this article or section. ...
Gender
Singular
Plural
Strong masculine
-es
-a
Weak masculine
-an
-ena
Strong feminine
-e
-a
Weak feminine
-an
-ena
Strong neuter
-es
-a
Weak neuter
-an
-ena
The term "Saxon genitive" is in analogy to the genitive in classical Latin. Latin is an ancient Indo-European language originally spoken in the region around Rome called Latium. ...
The genitive case (also called the second case) is a grammatical case that indicates a relationship, primarily one of possession, between the noun in the genitive case and another noun.
Some argue that it is a common misconception that English nouns have a genitive case, marked by the possessive -'s ending (known as the saxongenitive).
The 18th century explanation that the apostrophe might replace a genitive pronoun, as in "the king's horse" being a shortened form of "the king, his horse", is erroneous (a construction which actually occurs in German dialects and has replaced the genitive there, together with the "of" construction that also exists in English).
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