Latin
The genitive is one of the cases of nouns and pronouns in Latin. Latin genitives still have certain modern scientific uses:
- Scientific names of living things sometimes contain genitives, as in the plant name Buddleja davidii, meaning "David's buddleia". Here Davidii is the genitive of Davidius, a Latinized version of the English name. It is not capitalized because it is the second part of a scientific name.
- Names of astronomical constellations are Latin, and the genitives of their names are used in naming objects in those constellations, as in the Bayer designation of stars. For example, the brightest star in the constellation Virgo is called Alpha Virginis, which is to say "Alpha of Virgo", as virginis is the genitive of virgÅ.
Read more about this topic: Genitive Case
Famous quotes containing the word latin:
“You send your child to the schoolmaster, but ‘tis the schoolboys who educate him. You send him to the Latin class, but much of his tuition comes, on his way to school, from the shop- windows.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“He tries by a peculiar speech to speak
The peculiar potency of the general,
To compound the imagination’s Latin with
The lingua franca et jocundissima.”
—Wallace Stevens (1879–1955)
“Status quo, you know, that is Latin for “the mess we’re in.””
—Ronald Reagan (b. 1911)