GENITIVE (Lat. genitivus, relating to birth, from gignere, to produce). The name of one of the 'cases' in grammar. (See, DECLENSION.) In such an expression as (Latin) regis Pus, (English) the king's son, the form regis or king's is called the genitive case; and according to the usual explanation, this name was given it be cause it indicates the source or origin of the thing joined with it. In reality, however, the terms of grammar were originally applied, not to the parts of speech, but to the elements of thought; they were logical terms before they were grammatical. The Greek writers on dia lectics, in analyzing the different parts of an expressed thought, had distinguished the prin cipal notion, the subject or nominative as it is called, from secondary or dependent notions; the dependency of the latter they expressed by the word irrEiacc (Lat. cases), a fall or leaning of one thing upon another; and in such a propo sition as 'The king's son is dead,' they indicated the exact nature of the dependence by calling it the much the case showing the genus, kind, or class, the generic case; for while the name 'son' is applicable to every man having parents, `king's son' is limited to the class of sons having kings for their fathers. The names thus applied to ideas were transferred to the words expressing them by the Greek grammari ans of Alexandria, and were afterwards trans lated into their Latin equivalents by the Greek grammarians who taught their language to the youth of Rome. But by this time the terms had become strictly technical, and their original sig nification little thought of; and this may account for the Greek yevticC the Latin equivalent for which is generalis, being rendered by genitivus, generating or producing, which would have been expressed-in Greek by yevveruch.
In English the genitive is the only case or rela tion among nouns expressed by a difference of termination, and even it is often expressed by the preposition of; as the river's brink, or the brink of the river. From the frequency with which the form in 's indicates that one thing belongs to another, it is often called the possessive case. But this name is little applicable in such ex pressions as a day's journey; still less in many cases where the genitive is used in the ancient languages—e.g. fon* lactic, a fountain of milk. The generic case, however, meaning that which limits the other noun to a class or kind, will be found to express the real relation in every con ceivable combination.
The termination 's was often erroneously sup posed to be a contraction for his, as if 'the king's son' = 'the king his son'; but it is a genuine relic of the inflections (q.v.) common at an early stage to all the Indo-Germanic languages. S was one of the prevalent endings of the genitive singu lar in the Anglo-Saxon. With the ordinary plural termination in s, and sometimes in the singular when the noun ends in s, the additional s of the genitive is omitted, for the sake of the sound, as kings' sons, Francis' store.