In dependent-marking languages, a dependent genitive noun modifies the head by expressing some property of it.
Genitive constructions can be expressed in various ways: This is common in languages with grammatical case, e.g. Latin.
For example, the English so-called "Saxon genitive" (the "'s" modifier, as in "John's father" or "the King of Spain's house").
A construction called the double genitive is also used to precisely denote possession and resolve ambiguity in some cases.
A similar, although more dated, form may occur in Norwegian as well, where the above example may be expressed as huset hennes Hilde (lit.
"house-the her Hilde", with the non-reflexive possessive pronoun and reversed word order) with the same meaning as before.
However, that variant is restricted to where the possessor is a personal name or a familiar relation such as "father", and the equivalent of the Hungarian example would become ungrammatical: *vinduet dets hus (lit.
In the Pirahã language spoken in the Amazonas region of Brazil, pronouns do not inflect for possession, and they are used in a way similar to English -s: paitáPaitahi(s)hekaiíihousepaitá hi kaiíiPaita (s)he house"Paita's house"tiIkahaíarrowti kahaíI arrow"my arrow"NOTE: In this context, this is not the same as a possessive determiner such as "my" or "his".
This occurs in some modern languages (e.g. Dyirbal), and also in Old Georgian: perx-nifoot-NOM.PLk'ac-isa-niman-GEN-NOM.PLperx-ni k'ac-isa-nifoot-NOM.PL man-GEN-NOM.PL"the man's feet"This is the opposite, in some sense, to the normal usage of the genitive case, since it is the head noun, rather than the dependent, that is marked.
Typically, the special form is shorter than the original, and no other modifier (e.g. adjective) can intervene between head and dependent.