Possessive Determiner - Other Languages

Other Languages

Though in English the possessive determiners indicate definiteness, in other languages the definiteness needs to be added separately for grammatical correctness.

In Norwegian the phrase "my book" would be boka mi, where boka is the definite form of the feminine noun bok (book), and mi (my) is the possessive pronoun following feminine singular nouns.

In most Romance languages (such as Spanish, French, and Italian) the gender of the possessive determiners agrees with the thing(s) owned, not with the owner. French, for example, uses son for masculine nouns and also for feminine noun phrases starting with a vowel, sa elsewhere; compare Il a perdu son chapeau ("He lost his hat") with Elle a perdu son chapeau ("She lost her hat"). In this respect the possessive adjectives in these languages resemble ordinary adjectives. French also correlates possessive determiners to both the plurality of the possessor and possessee, as in notre voiture (our car) and nos voitures (our cars).

In Italian, constructions such as il tuo libro nero ("the your book black ", rendered in English as "your black book") and quel tuo libro nero ("that your book black", rendered in English as "that black book of yours") are grammatically correct. In Italian, the possessive determiners behave in almost every respect like adjectives.

Some Germanic languages, such as English and Dutch, use different pronouns depending on the owner. English has the (uninflected) words his and her; Dutch uses the (uninflected) zijn and haar. Other Germanic languages, such as German and several Dutch dialects including Limburgish and Brabantian, additionally use different forms depending of the grammatical gender of the object owned. German has sein (with inflected forms like seine) for masculine and ihr (with inflected forms like ihre) for feminine possessors; in German, the "hat" sentences above would be Er hat seinen Hut verloren (He lost his hat) and Sie hat ihren Hut verloren (She lost her hat) respectively. Brabantian inflects zijn (his) and haar (her) according to the grammatical gender and number of the thing(s) owned.

Some languages have no distinctive possessive adjectives, and express possession by declining personal pronouns in the genitive or possessive case, or by using possessive suffixes or particles. In Japanese, for example, boku no (a word for I coupled with the genitive particle no), is used for my or mine. In Mandarin Chinese, the possessive adjective and possessive pronoun take the same form as each other: the form associated with wǒ ("I") is wǒ de ("my", "mine"), where de is the possessive particle.

Some languages use the same word for both the possessive adjective and the matching possessive pronoun. For example, in Finnish (informal) meiän can mean either our or ours.