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Modern English is an example of a language that has a possessive case rather than a conventional genitive case. That is, Modern English indicates a genitive construction with either the possessive clitic suffix "-'s", or a prepositional genitive construction such as "x of y". However, some irregular English pronouns do have possessive forms ...
An example of an English word that has retained gender-specific spellings is the noun-form of blond/blonde, with the former being masculine and the latter being feminine. This distinction is retained primarily in British English. [29]
The English personal pronouns are a subset of English pronouns taking various forms according to number, person, case and grammatical gender. Modern English has very little inflection of nouns or adjectives, to the point where some authors describe it as an analytic language, but the Modern English system of personal pronouns has preserved some of the inflectional complexity of Old English and ...
A genitive construction involves two nouns, the head (or modified noun) and the dependent (or modifier noun). In dependent-marking languages, a dependent genitive noun modifies the head by expressing some property of it. For example, in the construction "John's jacket", "jacket" is the head and "John's" is the modifier, expressing a property of ...
The "his" genitive was not limited to masculine singular nouns in Middle English, but was is also found with feminine gender and plural number. It is only in the mid-16th century, in Early Modern English, that "agreeing" genitives are found like "Pallas her Glasse" from Sir Arthur Gorges 's English translation of Francis Bacon 's The Wisedome ...
There is also agreement in gender between pronouns and their antecedents. Examples of this can be found in English (although English pronouns principally follow natural gender rather than grammatical gender): The man reached his destination vs. The ship reached her/its destination; For more detail see Gender in English.
The possessive form of an English noun, or more generally a noun phrase, is made by suffixing a morpheme which is represented orthographically as ' s (the letter s preceded by an apostrophe), and is pronounced in the same way as the regular English plural ending (e)s: namely, as / ɪ z / when following a sibilant sound (/ s /, / z /, / ʃ /, / ʒ /, / tʃ / or / dʒ /), as / s / when following ...
As languages evolve, case systems change. In early Ancient Greek, for example, the genitive and ablative cases of given names became combined, giving five cases, rather than the six retained in Latin. In modern Hindi, the cases have been reduced to three: a direct case (for subjects and direct objects) and oblique case, and a vocative case.