What the %$#! are genitive dates?

by Michael S. Kaplan, published on 2004/12/25 03:15 -05:00, original URI: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/michkap/archive/2004/12/25/332259.aspx

Now as those who know me personally will attest I am not a linguist. But I often cannot help but act as if I know something about it. Yet you can tell I am not a linguist (or someone who ever got better than a B+ in grammar!) as I am about to go out on a limb and describe something based on what I think is meant. The reader is therefore warned! :-)

So, the question is more politely "what are genitive dates?". Well, to answer that question, we'll first start with the dictionary definition of genitive. We'll go with the very first definition since it described the intended usage:

Adj - Of, relating to, or being the grammatical case expressing possession, measurement, or source

In this particular situation, its to do with the that 'possessive' usage.

When in English (in the US) you say 'December 25' aloud you usually say "December twenty-fifth" and this all really a shorter form of "the twenty-fifth of December". Its not the traditional way one thinks of a possessive (after all December does not "own" the twenty-fifth day in the same sense that one would talk about 'my dignity' or 'the dignity of me' (before this posting of course!). But there is a possessive usage going on here, and in some sense December does indeed own 31 days, the twenty-fifth being one of them (while poor February, the 90-pound weakling of the calendar, owns a mere 28.25!).

Anyway, this form of "December" is the genitive form.

In English, 'December' on its own and the genitive forms such as those above are the same words, which is why you may never have learned about most of this in grade school (well, I did not in my grade school -- we could just always blame Beachwood elementary schools if everyone else learned this stuff). But this is not true of all languages. In Czech, for example, the twelfth month on its own is 'prosinec' and the genitive form is 'prosince'. In Greek the difference is 'Δεκέμβριος' versus 'Δεκεμβρίου', in Polish it's 'grudzień' versus 'grudnia'. In Russian it's 'Декабрь' versus 'декабря'. And so on for Belarusian (aka Byelorussian), Ukranian, Slovak, Latvin, Lithuanian, and others.

Lest any of my English speaking colleagues find this too confusing, they should probably consider trying to explain the differences between the words 'I' and 'me' and their genitive forms 'my' and 'mine' and when each is used, plus the capitalization of 'I'. They will busy for a long time trying to summarize that. Japanese has numerous ways to do counting which vary with the thing being counted yet many other things that are simpler like gender neutral honorific. Honestly, I suspect that every language to a non-native speaker has some things that are easier and some other things that are harder, yet a native speaker just handles them without even thinking. So perhaps we can forgive those with a different word used in genitive dates since the languages have done nothing wrong? :-)

At this point, if one is looking at the LOCALE_SMONTHNAME* flags in the Locale Information used by GetLocaleInfo or the MonthName array in the .NET Framework's DateTimeFormatInfo and wondering why I am going on about genitive dates when it looks like Windows does not support them. But if any of my readers have used Czech or any of those other languages then they can attest that GetDateFormat and the various formatting and parsing functions in the .NET Framework support them quite well, there is simply no method to obtain the raw data. Its one of those cool stealth features which speakers in other languages do not have and thus do not understand and do not expect, while speakers in those languages do not really think about since everything seems to be working. This has been working properly in Microsoft products since NT 4.0 and Windows 95 and probably earlier and has been in every version of the .NET Framework  that has ever shipped.

In fact, the upcoming version of the .NET Framework (code name Whidbey) includes new properties to set and retrieve the genitive form of the month names, so it is no longer really a "hidden" feature anyway. And it was never really hidden to be difficult; it was more that it is very hard to describe to anyone who does not use different forms for months. And things that are hard to document make stuff more confusing for everyone.

If nothing else, it is yet another reason to use the built-in functions and methods for formatting and parsing rather than trying to write one's own!

This post brought to you by "ᠲ" (U+1832, a.k.a MONGOLIAN LETTER TA)

# Chris Pearce on 25 Dec 2004 7:38 PM:

# George on 25 Dec 2004 11:18 PM:

# Michael Kaplan on 26 Dec 2004 1:30 AM:

# Michael Kaplan on 26 Dec 2004 1:32 AM:

# Igor Tandetnik on 26 Dec 2004 7:37 AM:

# Michael Kaplan on 26 Dec 2004 9:10 AM:

# kurakuraninja on 16 Jul 2005 2:49 PM:

Egbert Zijlema on 22 Mar 2011 4:23 PM:

Michael S. Kaplan on 22 Mar 2011 5:34 PM:

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