Genitive Case - Japanese

Japanese

The Japanese possessive is constructed by using the suffix -no 〜の to make the genitive case. For example:

Nominative: 猫 neko ('cat'); 手 te ('hand, paw')
Genitive: 猫の手 neko-no te ('cat's paw')

It also uses the suffix -na 〜な for adjectival noun; in some analyses adjectival nouns are simply nouns that take -na in the genitive, forming a complementary distribution (-no and -na being allomorphs).

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