ABSTRACT
Among the numerous cases found in primitive Aryan (Indo-European) and so well preserved in Sanskrit and ancient Greek, the one that has best resisted the corrosive tendencies found in all languages is undoubtedly the genitive. The preservation in ESc may be partly due to the sound by which it was most often expressed (s), but probably even more to the fact, that the meaning of this case was better defined than that of such cases as the dative or accusative, and that there seems to be a natural desire to have a convenient way of expressing relation between two notions of the kind indicated by the genitive ('belonging to' in the widest sense, as in Shelley's clothes, wife, father, poems, death, etc.). Therefore we find also, even in languages which have a prepositional group corresponding to the English genitive, a set of pronouns to express the same relation, the so-called possessive pronouns (my clothes, etc.).
