# Relation between case and gender



## dihydrogen monoxide

Is it possible that gender and cases are connected and that one cannot go without another. To name some examples:
a) English has no cases, therefore has no gender
b) Japanese has no cases, therefore has no gender
c) Chinese has no cases, therefore has no gender (wrong here, please 
d) Korean has no cases, therefore has no gender 
Maybe there are other languages which are the same that I may not know about.
So I would like to know if a language has no gender does this necessarily mean that language would not have a case?
I know some of you will say all of these languages have gender, they just express it in different ways, mainly using prepositions, and some suffixes. Or you may say that every language has cases and does not necessarily have genders, but the question is the relation between case and gender.


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## Outsider

The Romance languages have grammatical gender, but most of them have no cases. Although I suppose it might be argued that the genders in the Romance languages are a trace of the Latin genders -- Latin did have cases.


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## vput

Hungarian, Finnish and Turkish have cases but no grammatical gender.

Bulgarian and Macedonian show little of the original Proto-Slavonic case declensions and have grammatical gender.


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## Joannes

Combining the features 'number of genders' and 'number of cases' and simplifying their data in WALS (I used some tool - I'm not sure if the website does the same tricks), I arrived at the following numbers of languages:
Morphological case marking but no gender distinction: 62
No morphological case marking, no gender distinction: 45
Both case marking and gender distinction: 40
No morphological case marking but with gender distinction: 27

Given that morphological case marking is clearly more usual (161 languages that have it versus 100 that don't) than gender distinction (112 versus 144), I would say the given numbers shouldn't make us conclude that there is a relation between the two features.


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## palomnik

In my experience, only certain families of languages have gender.  In fact, I don't know if "gender" is a useful category when talking about language structure in the abstract.  the only language families I know that use it are Indo-European and Afro-Asiatic.

There are, of course, other languages that have classification systems for nouns, most notably Bantu languages.


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## modus.irrealis

Joannes said:


> Combining the features 'number of genders' and 'number of cases' and simplifying their data in WALS (I used some tool - I'm not sure if the website does the same tricks), I arrived at the following numbers of languages:


In the context of dihydrogen monoxide's question, though, it's interesting, that WALS classifies English as having 3 genders and 2 cases -- personally I agree with dihydrogen monoxide that it has neither but oh well.

To add another example, there's Armenian which has lost gender but not case.


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## Athaulf

modus.irrealis said:


> In the context of dihydrogen monoxide's question, though, it's interesting, that WALS classifies English as having 3 genders and 2 cases -- personally I agree with dihydrogen monoxide that it has neither but oh well.



I guess the issue is whether we're talking about the cases of nouns or pronouns. For nouns, I agree  that there are no cases -- adding the _'s _ending to a noun produces something that's, in my opinion, more akin to a possessive adjective than a real genitive case. Also, the _'s_ ending itself is more like a clitic than a case ending, since it can be attached to a whole noun phrase, which definitely can't be done with a case ending in languages that have kept the old IE genitive. But for pronouns, there are definitely at least two cases, and one could even argue that _three_ pronoun cases exist (_I_, _me_, _mine _-- the last one is required with the preposition _of_ in its possessive meaning, just like a real genitive case).

As for genders, they definitely don't exist any more as a morphological category, but again, there is the issue of syntactic agreement between pronouns and the noun phrases they refer to. You still have to choose between _he_, _she_, and _it_ when using a pronoun to refer to something you previously mentioned. It's certainly only a tiny remnant of the old IE gender system compared to e.g. Romance (let alone Slavic or Baltic) languages, but it still classifies all nouns into three genders.


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## Fred_C

Athaulf said:


> It's certainly only a tiny remnant of the old IE gender system compared to e.g. Romance (let alone Slavic or Baltic) languages, but it still classifies all nouns into three genders.


 
 Hi,
I do not agree exactly with you. 
In English you decide to use "he" "she" or "it" according to the _*thing or person*_ you have in mind.
In a gender language, you decide according to the _*noun*_ with which you previously mentioned that thing.


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## Outsider

Fred_C said:


> In english you decide to use "he" "she" or "it" according to the _*thing or person*_ you have in mind.
> In a gender language, you decide according to the _*noun*_ with which you previously mentioned that thing.


Actually, in a gender language you choose between "he", "she" and "it" according to both things you mentioned. In many instances, the gender of a noun is determined by the semantic gender of its referent (more often than not, when speaking of people).


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## Sepia

English, as well as the other Germanic language that have a simplified gender system still have cases and genders: In the pronouns. They work the same way.


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## Outsider

Yes, but when we speak of "having genders" or "having cases" we're normally thinking of languages where all nouns (or nearly 100%) change their form to agree with gender and case categories. This does not happen in English, where all nouns are transparent to case, and only a pathological few change with gender (emperor/empress, king/queen, etc.)


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## Sepia

Outsider said:


> Yes, but when we speak of "having genders" or "having cases" we're normally thinking of languages where all nouns (or nearly 100%) change their form to agree with gender and case categories. This does not happen in English, where all nouns are transparent to case, and only a pathological few change with gender (emperor/empress, king/queen, etc.)




The Genitive is a case too. All Germanic languages have a case ending for the Genitive. So basically the threadstarter-thesis is wrong.
Since I don't know where that thesis is going to take us, I think that is an important fact to keep in mind.

Even though there is no gender, what nouns are concerned, there can be case endings. As well as various other noun endings with differnt functions.


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## modus.irrealis

Athaulf said:


> I guess the issue is whether we're talking about the cases of nouns or pronouns. For nouns, I agree  that there are no cases -- adding the _'s _ending to a noun produces something that's, in my opinion, more akin to a possessive adjective than a real genitive case. Also, the _'s_ ending itself is more like a clitic than a case ending, since it can be attached to a whole noun phrase, which definitely can't be done with a case ending in languages that have kept the old IE genitive. But for pronouns, there are definitely at least two cases, and one could even argue that _three_ pronoun cases exist (_I_, _me_, _mine _-- the last one is required with the preposition _of_ in its possessive meaning, just like a real genitive case).


Yes, that's my thinking about nouns, that _'s_ is no longer a case ending since it is attached to noun phrases. About pronouns, there probably is a case system as you say (although the possessive forms _my/mine_ could be seen as possessive adjectives derived from the pronoun, and the distinction between _me _and _I_ might be something other than case in the spoken language with things like _Bob and me went to the store_ or _between you and I_). The WALS site, however, doesn't recognize French or Italian as having cases, so it clearly means case on nouns.



> As for genders, they definitely don't exist any more as a morphological category, but again, there is the issue of syntactic agreement between pronouns and the noun phrases they refer to. You still have to choose between _he_, _she_, and _it_ when using a pronoun to refer to something you previously mentioned. It's certainly only a tiny remnant of the old IE gender system compared to e.g. Romance (let alone Slavic or Baltic) languages, but it still classifies all nouns into three genders.


But I disagree that it is _syntactic _agreement, mostly because I can't think of any case where choosing the "wrong" pronoun would lead to an ungrammatical sentence -- you can get some strange sentences that way which would probably never be said, but I find them all acceptable. The other problem with this approach is the question of how many genders does Swedish have, since it has two genders if you go by article/adjective agreement (common/neuter) but it has four pronouns: _han_ he, _hon_ she, _den_ it (common), _det_ it (neuter). Unfortunately WALS doesn't give an answer for Swedish.

Edit: come to think of it, why doesn't English have four genders then, through the use of singular _they_?


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## Sepia

modus.irrealis said:


> Yes, that's my thinking about nouns, that _'s_ is no longer a case ending since it is attached to noun phrases. About pronouns, there probably is a case system as you say (although the possessive forms _my/mine_ could be seen as possessive adjectives derived from the pronoun, and the distinction between _me _and _I_ might be something other than case in the spoken language with things like _Bob and me went to the store_ or _between you and I_). The WALS site, however, doesn't recognize French or Italian as having cases, so it clearly means case on nouns.
> 
> But I disagree that it is _syntactic _agreement, mostly because I can't think of any case where choosing the "wrong" pronoun would lead to an ungrammatical sentence -- you can get some strange sentences that way which would probably never be said, but I find them all acceptable. The other problem with this approach is the question of how many genders does Swedish have, since it has two genders if you go by article/adjective agreement (common/neuter) but it has four pronouns: _han_ he, _hon_ she, _den_ it (common), _det_ it (neuter). Unfortunately WALS doesn't give an answer for Swedish.
> 
> Edit: come to think of it, why doesn't English have four genders then, through the use of singular _they_?



Swedish - just like Danish - has only two genders, and both these languages have genitive endings and only one set of endings in plural.

But talking Scandinavian - there are other noun-endings than cases.

Danish:

a dog = en hund

the dog = hunden


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## modus.irrealis

Sepia said:


> Swedish - just like Danish - has only two genders, and both these languages have genitive endings and only one set of endings in plural.


I would also say that Swedish has two genders, but for the same reason that I would say that English has none. But if English has three genders, then I don't see why Swedish doesn't have four.

What do you mean by "only one set of endings in plural?"


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## Outsider

Sepia said:


> The Genitive is a case too. All Germanic languages have a case ending for the Genitive. So basically the threadstarter-thesis is wrong.


DH's thesis, if I understood it well, is that "if there is gender, then there are cases".

This is not strictly speaking true in the Romance languages, but in this case we might rationalize away the lack of cases by noting that Latin did have both genders and cases. I don't see how the Germanic languages would refute his thesis.

Incidentally, what about the Bantu languages -- which have noun classes, a similar thing to genders -- do they have cases?


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## Sepia

Outsider said:


> DH's thesis, if I understood it well, is that "if there is gender, then there are cases".
> 
> This is not strictly speaking true in the Romance languages, but in this case we might rationalize away the lack of cases by noting that Latin did have both genders and cases. I don't see how the Germanic languages would refute his thesis.
> ,,,


 
But English IS a germanic language. So are the Jutland dialects of Danish - just for starters. They get along without gender (or one gender) and still have at least the genitive case in the nouns a couple more in the personal pronouns. Cases are cases - gender is gender. The fact that the English genitive is written with 's does not mean more than that somebody wanted to distinguish it from the writing of the plural ending. The other languages that simply use an "s" as genitive-case ending do not use the ' .

So: "If there is gender there are cases" may be true although this does not necessarily mean "if there is no gender there are no cases".

So obviously the two things can develop totally without dependence on each other, just like other noun-forms can (as I demonstrated up-thread). 

I would be surprised if there wasn't some language with only one gender for nouns, but with some 5-10 cases to go with them. It will not be an indoeuropean one, but there are about 150 other languages to take into consideration.


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## Joannes

modus.irrealis said:


> In the context of dihydrogen monoxide's question, though, it's interesting, that WALS classifies English as having 3 genders and 2 cases -- personally I agree with dihydrogen monoxide that it has neither but oh well.


Me too.



Sepia said:


> Cases are cases - gender is gender. The fact that the English genitive is written with 's does not mean more than that somebody wanted to distinguish it from the writing of the plural ending. The other languages that simply use an "s" as genitive-case ending do not use the ' .


So-called English _'s-genitive_ is no case, not because of its orthography, but because the *'s* _is_ a clitic and not a morpheme. (Similarly, 'genitives' in Dutch and Danish are no cases.)



Sepia said:


> I would be surprised if there wasn't some language with only one gender for nouns, but with some 5-10 cases to go with them. It will not be an indoeuropean one, but there are about 150 other languages to take into consideration.


There's Finnish, Hungarian, Basque, only to name a few. Armenian, already mentioned by modus.irrealis, _is_ an Indo-European one. (I don't quite see why you would take only another 150 languages in consideration btw..)


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## Outsider

Sepia said:


> So obviously the two things can develop totally without dependence on each other, just like other noun-forms can (as I demonstrated up-thread).


I don't agree that that's obvious. If DH's thesis is supported by the evidence, then it might be that genders develop _from_ case inflections that are later reinterpreted. If so, they would not be independent, even though it's still possible for a language to have case without gender.


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## Sepia

Joannes said:


> Me too.
> 
> 
> So-called English _'s-genitive_ is no case, not because of its orthography, but because the *'s* _is_ a clitic and not a morpheme. (Similarly, 'genitives' in Dutch and Danish are no cases.)
> ...


 

Grammar can be interpreted in different ways. Even though you don't consider it a genitive case lots of other people do. The school system I grew up with, for one. Besides, if I am not mistaken, the "s" ending is the rest of the 7-case system of earlier versions of the language. 

But if you want to see it that way in an attempt to prove a not really well founded thesis right, it is a free country. With "not really well founded" I mean "based on less than 10-15 of the probably 150-170 languages that exist on this planet.

But if you stay with the clitic-thesis, which should, according to you, be the neighbouring word it is formed of - in any of the three languages we mentioned, for that matter. That would really interest me.


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## Joannes

Sepia said:


> But if you want to see it that way in an attempt to prove a not really well founded thesis right, it is a free country. With "not really well founded" I mean "based on less than 10-15 of the probably 150-170 languages that exist on this planet.


Actually, I don't believe the thesis myself, so I'm not trying to prove it right. Moreover, I don't see how this one particular case would prove the whole thesis right or wrong. I think that the WALS data I gave earlier in this thread give a better view on things.

(I don't know where you got the figure of 150-170, btw, but you should know that there are about 40x as many languages worldwide!)



Sepia said:


> But if you stay with the clitic-thesis, which should, according to you, be the neighbouring word it is formed of - in any of the three languages we mentioned, for that matter. That would really interest me.


I don't understand what you mean.


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## Sepia

Joannes said:


> Actually, I don't believe the thesis myself, so I'm not trying to prove it right. Moreover, I don't see how this one particular case would prove the whole thesis right or wrong. I think that the WALS data I gave earlier in this thread give a better view on things.
> 
> (I don't know where you got the figure of 150-170, btw, but you should know that there are about 40x as many languages worldwide!)
> 
> 
> I don't understand what you mean.


 

Look up the definition of "clitic" in Merriam-Websters, then it should be clear what I mean.

So once again, if the "s" is not a case ending where does it come from, according to you. I mean, most case endings in the Indo-European and probably many other languages may originally have been single words - postpositions - that at some time or other melted together with the nouns. But we are talking here about languages that are already beyond that development and that used to have a number of case endings and now only have an "s" for genitive. I would really like to know how this "s" suddenly becomes a clitic?

And what the number of languages is concerned it depends on what you consider languages or just dialects. So I stayed with the lowest estimates I've heard of. Adding more to that number only emphasizes my point.


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## Outsider

For the reason why the _'s_ ending in modern English is considered a clitic, and not a case ending, see this Wikipedia article.

Historically, it is true that it derives from a case ending, but its syntactic behaviour has since changed.


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## Athaulf

Outsider said:


> For the reason why the _'s_ ending in modern English is considered a clitic, and not a case ending, see this Wikipedia article.
> 
> Historically, it is true that it derives from a case ending, but its syntactic behaviour has since changed.



Here's a link to another interesting article, which I also cited in a recent thread that touched on the issue of clitics vs. inflections: http://www.stanford.edu/%7Ezwicky/ZPCliticsInfl.pdf. Its main topic is the status of English _n't_ contraction, but it also contains a lot of interesting discussion about general criteria for differentiating between clitics and inflections, and it also includes some discussion of the status of _'s_.


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## Outsider

Very interesting article! Thank you, Athaulf.


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## Sepia

Athaulf said:


> Here's a link to another interesting article, which I also cited in a recent thread that touched on the issue of clitics vs. inflections: http://www.stanford.edu/~zwicky/ZPCliticsInfl.pdf. Its main topic is the status of English _n't_ contraction, but it also contains a lot of interesting discussion about general criteria for differentiating between clitics and inflections, and it also includes some discussion of the status of _'s_.


 

The mentioned Wikipedia article begins with "Some argue that it is a common misconception ...". So obviously the article is exactly doing this - referring to the arguments of some people - that is, without implicitly nor explicitly claiming these arguments are shared by any minority.
The funny thing about this thread now is that we do not only have some people claiming that a certain type of genitive is not at genitive, but we have also (at best) different definitions of that which the non-genitive case is supposed to be: A clitic.
According to Merriam-Webster a clitic is*:* a word that is treated in pronunciation as forming a part of a neighboring word and that is often unaccented or contracted.
At least by this definition it is definitely not a clitic since the "s" is not a word and if it is turning into a word of its own some time of the future, of which we could make it a clitic, is irrelevant.
This is the only valid definition of "clitic" I know so obviously the theory is not correct or else they have different definition for the word "clitic".
Furthermore, like I already have mentioned up thread, if the apostrophe is supposed to be the criteria for not considering the genitive case(s) (taking various languages into consideration), what about the genitive case of "it".

If you want clitics, I'll give you one:

it's

The only problem with this one is that is not the genitive case of "it" rather than the contraction of "it is". The correct genitive case of "it" is "its". Furthermore we have a good number of Germanic languages - at least four - other than English and "Nederlands" (or Dutch, if you like) that write the genitive-s without an apostrophe.

Besides I could give you several clitics from various Germanic and Romance languages that are written without an apostrophe. So statistically, by an overall view there should be no reason for the apostrophe having any significance in terms of deciding if it is a clitic or not. I'd say, the fact that clitics often are connected to the main word with an apostrophe in the English language leads some folks to mix up cause and effect.

Fine, if the clitic-fraction have a valid definition of "clitic" that in fact is compatible to the theory referred to, and this view of the grammar works in practical terms, go ahead. If it works - that is, if it contributes to maintaining the standard of the language - then it works. I have said it before, there are different ways of analyzing grammar and putting the results of the analysis into practical use. There many situations where different interpretations of the grammar all contribute to maintaining the standard of the language. That is what we have theoretical grammar for, I suppose. 

Still that does not change the fact that it a perfectly valid and practical way of going about things, still considering the "-s"-genitives (In English and other Germanic languages with a similar genitive case) what they always were: Genitive cases. 

But claiming this is a misconception, just because they have come up with a different theory is simply arrogant nonsense.

And now this finally brings us back on topic (I hope): 

English has no genders to the nouns (any more). The Jutland dialect of Danish has no genders to the nouns either. (The Jutland dialect only has the article for the M/F gender - no N). Both languages still have a genitive case, marked with an "s" that is spoken as an ending, by illiterates as well as by people who can read and write. (Just to question the relevance of the way it is written - they have probably been spoken this way for generations by lots of people who did not have the privilege or learning to read and write - it is their language too!!!)
Thus case endings can exist without noun-genders.
Furthermore I thought closer about the mentioning of Japanese. Sure, Japanese has no noun-genders and no case endings. But its equivalent of the case endings are the postpositions. In a different thread in this forum the theory emerged that the case endings single words/particles spoken after the noun (post-positions) that finally became parts of the noun.
It is claimed that Finnish belongs to the same group of languages as Japanese and Korean. However, Finnish has, I think 15 case-endings and no prepositions. I don't know if they have noun-genders but obviously the postpositions actually became case endings somewhere along the way. 
So a language with 15 case-endings being related with one with no noun-genders, no-case endings: Please give me just one logical reason why there should not be several other languages along this line with case-endings and no case-gender.


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## modus.irrealis

Sepia said:


> Still that does not change the fact that it a perfectly valid and practical way of going about things, still considering the "-s"-genitives (In English and other Germanic languages with a similar genitive case) what they always were: Genitive cases.


But can you give an example of a language that uncontroversially has a genitive case and uses it like English does in "the Queen of England's crown" or "the governor general's tie" (or in more extreme examples found in the spoken language like "the man in the black's tie" or "the house that was just built's garage")? In all the languages I know that have a genitive case, it would be _Queen, governor, man, _and _house_ that would be marked as genitive.

That to me is why calling it a genitive _case_ is misleading, because the possessive is applied to entire noun phrases -- of course, if a noun phrase consists only of a single noun then it looks and functions like a genitive case, but it seems clear to me that is just a special case of a more general construction that English has.


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## Joannes

If Merriam-Webster's definition is the only one you found, Sepia, then you didn't look very far. If it is the only one you thought to be 'valid', then you have weird ways of assessing your sources. Why not consult more linguistic sources, like this one for example (there's tons)? Besides, I don't see why *'s* wouldn't fit Merriam-Webster's defintion. Because it's not a word? Why wouldn't it be? A _word_ is about as badly defined as a term can get (except in Merriam-Webster's, I suppose ). And even if strictly speaking *'s* isn't a word, should we have expected a popular dictionary to deal with this kind of intricacies? Please consult some more linguistic sources (they came up with the term after all), preferably ones that deal with how to differentiate between affixes and clitics (that will be through structural characteristics) and you will find out that theoretical frameworks agree on English* 's* being in fact a clitic.

Now we come to the question as to why a clitic construction shouldn't be considered a case. Well, it could be (here you are ), if you include non-morpholgical case. However, traditionally case is understood to be a morphological phenomenon, i.e. to function on word level. Being a clitic, English *'s* functions on a higher level, though, namely on the level of whole (noun) phrases; it functions in a syntactic way. If you allow syntactic structures to be regarded as case, then I'm interested to hear your arguments why an English *of*-construction shouldn't also be considered a genitive case. And what to do with double genitives like *a picture of my friend's*?


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## Sepia

modus.irrealis said:


> ... or "the governor general's tie" (or in more extreme examples found in the spoken language like "the man in the black's tie" or "the house that was just built's garage.....



Ehm, who considers the abovementioned proper English?

And
"the Queen of England's crown" 

is treated the same way in Danish only without the apostrophe. 

The other article mentioned only talk about clitics that are really formed of neighbouring words. So even though I did not look very far for other definitions, this author bases his stuff on an identical defnition - obviously!

So where does this take us. Does it prove the opening post right or wrong? It does neither, I'd say.


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## modus.irrealis

Sepia said:


> Ehm, who considers the abovementioned proper English?


One, I have no idea what you mean by "proper" nor do I accept the implication that only this proper English is worthy of being analyzed, but two, whatever you mean by "proper", what do you think is not proper about "governor general's"? It's perfectly acceptable as you can see yourself by searching www.gg.ca for example.



> And
> "the Queen of England's crown"
> 
> is treated the same way in Danish only without the apostrophe.


Then I would argue that Danish doesn't have a genitive case either. Do you at least agree that English (and Danish) do things is a lot differently than a language like Latin (_reginae Angliae_ where _reginae _is the genitive of _regina_) or German (_der Königin von England_)? (The German example would have been nicer if feminine nouns changed in the genitive, but I guess I could have used _des Königs von England_.)



> So where does this take us. Does it prove the opening post right or wrong? It does neither, I'd say.


I think English, like the original post said, is an example of a language that has neither gender nor case, but so many examples have been given of languages that have one but not the other that one cannot claim that there is some relationship between the two in general.


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## Outsider

I remembered another example:

Everyone else's opinion.​Here, the possessor is "everyone", but the _'s_ is attached to "else". That is, it's placed at the end of the noun phrase.



modus.irrealis said:


> I think English, like the original post said, is an example of a language that has neither gender nor case, but so many examples have been given of languages that have one but not the other that one cannot claim that there is some relationship between the two in general.


We have seen examples of languages:


with gender and case
without gender but with case
I think it could be argued that we haven't seen any example of a language that has gender, but never had any cases...


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## modus.irrealis

Outsider said:


> I think it could be argued that we haven't seen any example of a language that has gender, but never had any cases...


Hmm... for some reason I keep limiting case to case on nouns, and I was thinking of some of the Romance languages that were mentioned. As for other examples, what about Hebrew or colloquial varieties of Arabic? Do they still show any signs of case?


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## Outsider

Whether they still have cases today or not, I don't think there is much doubt that they had them at one time in the past...


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## modus.irrealis

Outsider said:


> Whether they still have cases today or not, I don't think there is much doubt that they had them at one time in the past...


Why is it important to find an example of a language that never had it, especially when that's something we can basically never know seeing as we cannot trace languages all that far into the past?


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## Athaulf

Outsider said:


> I remembered another example:Everyone else's opinion.​Here, the possessor is "everyone", but the _'s_ is attached to "else". That is, it's placed at the end of the noun phrase.



It's entirely uncontroversial that _'s_ can attach to noun phrases in Standard English. For example, an extremely common pattern is possessive pronoun + adjective + noun_ + 's_: _my older sister's wedding_, _his favorite band's CD_, etc. There is indeed some limit to the complexity of noun phrases to which _'s_ can attach, but that's a very complicated question. 



> We have seen examples of languages:
> 
> 
> with gender and case
> without gender but with case
> I think it could be argued that we haven't seen any example of a language that has gender, but never had any cases...


I don't think it makes sense to ask about languages that _never_ had any cases. I'm pretty sure that just about any language, no matter how analytic, has passed through a stage in which it had at least some case marking of nouns in not too remote past. When it comes to Romance languages, we know that they used to have a case system because their documented history happens to be extraordinarily long. However, the vast majority of world's languages have a far shorter documented history, if any at all, so if we're going to dismiss examples because the languages in question had cases thousands of years ago, we're in a pretty hopeless situation, since any language might plausibly have lost its cases just before its first attestation.


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## Outsider

Athaulf said:


> I don't think it makes sense to ask about languages that _never_ had any cases. I'm pretty sure that just about any language, no matter how analytic, has passed through a stage in which it had at least some case marking of nouns in not too remote past.


The best we can do is talk about the known past. That goes without saying in linguistics, does it not?

In any even, when one starts considering time spans of many thousands of years, it becomes problematic to even say that we're talking about the same language, as languages have a tendency to split or become extinct in the long run.



modus.irrealis said:


> Why is it important to find an example of a language that never had it, especially when that's something we can basically never know seeing as we cannot trace languages all that far into the past?


Because *DM*'s thesis (if I interpreted it correctly -- he has never confirmed) is that all languages that have gender also have cases. In order to disprove this thesis, we must find some language that has gender, but never had cases (at least in its recent history).


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## modus.irrealis

Outsider said:


> Because *DM*'s thesis (if I interpreted it correctly -- he has never confirmed) is that all languages that have gender also have cases. In order to disprove this thesis, we must find some language that has gender, but never had cases (at least in its recent history).


I still don't get the never part -- if a language has both and loses only case, this seems to me to suggest that you can have gender without case. I think you'd need to look at the history if it were a claim along the lines that you can't acquire gender without acquiring case.

Anyway, for counterexamples, it might be useful to look at Native American languages, about which I know very little. This book seems to indicate that Ojibwe does not mark case on the nouns but on the verb, but I know the language has a animate-inaminate gender system, so this is a possible counterexample.


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## Outsider

modus.irrealis said:


> I still don't get the never part -- if a language has both and loses only case, this seems to me to suggest that you can have gender without case.


Well, if we're going to interpret DM's thesis that narrowly, then it has already been disproven, by the second post in this thread.


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## Athaulf

Outsider said:


> The best we can do is talk about the known past. That goes without saying in linguistics, does it not?
> [...]
> Because *DM*'s thesis (if I interpreted it correctly -- he has never confirmed) is that all languages that have gender also have cases. In order to disprove this thesis, we must find some language that has gender, but never had cases (at least in its recent history).



Yes, but how long must a language exist without cases that we can say that it "never had cases" according to your criteria? Various Romance languages have been in such a state for centuries, and some of them for well over a millennium. 

Imagine if the oldest documentary evidence of Portuguese or Italian were only five or six hundred years old, like with e.g. Albanian or Lithuanian. Would you then accept them as languages that have gender, but never had cases in their (recent) history? If not, then I think the question is entirely hopeless, since only a tiny minority of the world's languages were first written down more than a few centuries ago. You'll probably agree that from a global perspective, Romance languages are extravagantly exceptional when it comes to how much and how far into the past we know about their historical development.


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## Hulalessar

Three things strike me about this fascinating discussion:

1. Astonishingly and despite (and perhaps because of) the fact that I am a native English speaker I had never noticed that the possessive _'s _attaches to phrases.

2. There seems to be an assumption that the possessive_ 's_ must be either a case ending or an enclitic (whatever an enclitic may be). Perhaps it is, as lawyers like to say, simply _sui generis_. Not every feature of a language fits neatly into preconceived notions. "Speech is too variable and too elusive to be quite safely ticketed." (Sapir)

3. I am even more convinced than I was before that the way a language is analysed can be heavily influenced by the way it is written.


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## wonderment

Outsider said:


> The best we can do is talk about the known past. That goes without saying in linguistics, does it not?...
> 
> Because *DM*'s thesis (if I interpreted it correctly -- he has never confirmed) is that all languages that have gender also have cases. In order to disprove this thesis, we must find some language that has gender, but never had cases (at least in its recent history).



Do classical languages count? Syriac (a dialect of Aramaic, a Semitic language) has two genders and no cases. It does have three grammatical states (emphatic, construct, and absolute), but they function very differently from and do not correspond to cases. I don't know if this situation obtains for Modern Aramaic (I suspect that it does). Hopefully someone could confirm...


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## Sepia

Outsider said:


> I remembered another example:
> Everyone else's opinion.​Here, the possessor is "everyone", but the _'s_ is attached to "else". That is, it's placed at the end of the noun phrase.
> 
> ...



Well, like I said, there are different ways of analyzing languages and their grammar.  The system they taught at the University where I studied treated things in a totally different way as I had learned in grade and high school. We would work our way through the various constellations of words level by level. So working our way through the first level we would have no problem with simply considering a stupid construction like

everybody else's parents' in-laws' 

(cars were parked in front of the house)

as a genitive object. Not that we woudlwrithe such a stupid sentense ourselves, but you never know what you get to translate. Working our way down level by level we splitting it up in smaller units and define their functions. That is especially practical when comparing languages - which you do all the time, when translating. 

There is no problem with The surgeon general's office". The surgeon general, the district atorney etc. are complete titles that you can treat as single nouns. The fact that they are constructed of two or more nouns is without importance. I link is a link, even if it is a complete sentence that can also be considered the direct object of its main sentence.

So in this system, that does not necessarily need to be your system, the examples you have given are still genitives. I am not alone in this view, though, because Danish genitives are constructed in about 95% the same way as English genitives and are still considered as such in Danish school systems - which to a wide extent rely on guidelines from  the Danish Language Council.

(... and what clitics are concerned, I expect foreros to be able to communicate what they mean, if they have valid and differing definitions of it ... I don't go searching for the case that ...etc.)


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## modus.irrealis

The "general" in "governor general" is an adjective (the plural, for example, in the usage I'm familiar with is "governors general"), so I used this as another example of where the _'s_ attaches to the final word of the noun phrase and not to the head noun, as it would in a language with a standard genitive case.


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