Genitively Deficient

One of the interesting little facts about Britain I learned from my fellow teachers in Moscow is that British people absolutely adore Indian food--or at least, what they perceive as Indian food, since a fair amount of what passes for Indian food in Britain was actually created on the Sceptred Isle by Indian immigrants, and is not actually known in India. A few years back, a British politician actually declared chicken tikka massala Britain's "national dish".

Chicken tikka massala, it turns out, is a rather odd dish, because there is no actual agreement about what the essential ingredients for it are. According to Wikipedia, one survey of 30-40 recipes for the dish could find only one ingredient common to all of them: chicken.

Well, it turns out that the world of lingustics has its own chicken tikka massala.

In reading The Loom of Language, I've gotten to learn some interesting facts about what is known as the genitive case in inflected languages. Long ago in school, I got to learn about the genitive case as it existed in Classical Greek and Latin. Briefly, what I was taught about the genitive case was as follows:

1. The genitive case can take the place of what would be a possessive with 's in English. So in the Latin for That is the boy's book, boy's would be in the genitive case.
2. The genitive case can express an origin point--i.e., in the Latin for The wheat is from Kansas, from Kansas would be one noun in the genitive case.
3. The genitive case is used in situations where English uses the preposition of--i.e., in the Latin for The stack of books is over there, of books would be one noun in the genitive case.

Well, it turns out all of this is, as Jane Austen would say, a truth not universally acknowledged. By the 1940s, linguists had examined all of the languages that had had, or at the time still had, something the grammar books called the genitive case--and they could find not one single use that was common to all of them, across the languages. The genitive case, it turns out, is the linguists' chicken tikka massala; the only thing common to all of the "genitive cases" across the languages of Europe is that grammarians call them genitive (incidentally, this was true of English grammarians at one time; until about the mid-18th century, English grammarians often called the possessive with 's the genitive form of English nouns, even though it has only one feature of the Greco-Latin genitive).

Oddly, this doesn't surprise me, because of something I discovered during my brief foray into Russian. Greek and Latin have another case called the dative case which, I was taught, took the place of the English prepositions to or for. So when I learned the Russian word dla (meaning for), I assumed it would be followed by the dative case. In fact, dla requires not the dative but the genitive case in Russian.

What this likely means is that grammarians in all of these languages took something that actually existed in Latin and basically imagined it into their own langauages' grammars, even when it didn't really exist there.