What does 'the comma' convey?

[TheParser]

Sorry Parser, but I don't believe in the existence of a genitive form in English.

My bad! (That's young people's talk for "my mistake.")

[5jj]

My bad! (That's young people's talk for "my mistake.")

It's just a matter of labelling, Parser. Like many (but not all) people, I am not in favour of using labels designed for Latin grammar when talking about English. Some writers who feel like me about this call it the 'possessive' form. It's so widely used, that I have been known to use it myself; it is, after all, commonly used to show posssession, or, at least ownership. However, leaving aside the phrases we have been discussing, I have never been happy with the idea of either possession or ownership in such phrases as 'Peter's brother'.

I suppose I should refer to it as the 's plus apostophe' form.

[BobK]

I love you two and the way you deal with the problem, go on cause you're showing me the rope...

Incidentally, the idiom you have in mind is 'showing me the ropes' - like so many other metaphors in English, this has a nautical origin: 'the ropes' are the ropes on a sailing ship.

b

[faryan]

Thank you all.

[birdeen's call]

It's just a matter of labelling, Parser. Like many (but not all) people, I am not in favour of using labels designed for Latin grammar when talking about English. Some writers who feel like me about this call it the 'possessive' form. It's so widely used, that I have been known to use it myself; it is, after all, commonly used to show posssession, or, at least ownership. However, leaving aside the phrases we have been discussing, I have never been happy with the idea of either possession or ownership in such phrases as 'Peter's brother'.

I think this could be an argument for "genitive" being a better word than "possessive" here. I'd rather "s plus apostrophe" didn't stick. I never know how write such things. This a combination of what I've seen and what I can imagine

s plus apostrophe
's' plus apostrophe
"s" plus apostrophe
S plus apostrophe
'S' plus apostrophe
"S" plus aopstrophe
ess plus apostrophe

The last one seems the easiest to handle in the various situations one might encounter. But I've never seen it. Now these should be at least multipied by two when it's used as an adjective. Every one of them could be hyphenated or not.

All these oddities that come creeping into languages make a decent person spend their time wondering how many nested quotation marks is still OK instead of writing down their thoughts.

[BobK]

...Like many (but not all) people, I am not in favour of using labels designed for Latin grammar when talking about English. Some writers who feel like me about this call it the 'possessive' form. It's so widely used, that I have been known to use it myself; it is, after all, commonly used to show posssession, or, at least ownership. However, leaving aside the phrases we have been discussing, I have never been happy with the idea of either possession or ownership in such phrases as 'Peter's brother'.

...

This isn't a knock-down argument, or even a particularly persuasive one but it's striking (to me, at least) that the words genitiive and gene have a common ancestor, so that in one sense phrases such as 'Peter's brother' can most accurately be termed 'genitive'.

b

[TheParser]

the words genitiive and gene have a common ancestor, so that in one sense phrases such as 'Peter's brother' can most accurately be termed 'genitive'.

b

Thank you for teaching us learners that interesting fact. Nice way to start today.

(It's 2:50 a.m. here.)