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In-Reply-To: <1993Jan8.151334.6482@desire.wright.edu> w0318@desire.wright.edu

> Can anyone out there give me a brief history of the evolution of the genitive
> morphology of German throughout its history of a language, including any
> explanative points from Proto-Germanic, etc...

What? for all the declensions, singular and plural?

> If masculine and neuter nouns change their ending in the genitive as -es, as in
> die Mutter meines Vaters, and feminine nouns don't have the -es ending, as in
> der Vater meiner Mutter, why when making compound nouns with feminine nouns is
> there sometimes something like die VergangenheitSbewaeltigung?  Notice the
> genitive 's' there, I would conjecture that it follows from a pronunciation
> rule,

I don't *know* the answer to this but I can think of two
non-exclusive answers. 1) The point you suggest about pronunciation (not
a rule, though, it's too irregular for that), i.e. to ease the
transition between two consonants. 2) But initially probably the analogy
of the masc. & neuters where people must have come to regard it as a
compounding feature rather than as a reflex of the genitive. It would
certainly be interesting to find the earliest example of this -s-
with a feminine.

Peter
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Peter Christian                         
  Dept of European Languages              peter@gold.ac.uk
  Goldsmiths' College, London.            petex@cix.compulink.co.uk
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