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I believe it, emotional attachment.


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Hi -back at you. Welcome.


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Good to have you here, zeun. We're a mad bunch, but mostly harmless!


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Be careful with that statement RC.


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Careful? Me? C'mon, now - I have a reputation to maintain.


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Incidentally, getting back to the original question:
Back when case meant something in English and we actually marked it in nouns different prepositions took different cases in their noun objects. We have dumped all case markings in nouns except the genitive. So, the one case where it is shown we think is abnormal. Really, it's all the instances where it's not shown that are the abnormal ones.

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I dug up the initial post
Originally Posted By: BranShea
Here's a little thing I longtime wanted to ask. You say:

I will be at my sister's.
She's a friend of my sister's.

In the first sentence this seems clearly to mean: "At my sister's " house or place.
The second form always struck me as odd. "a friend of my sister's" ... what?

Maybe I am making mistakes here, but I just would like to know the details about this. (thanks)

I reread the Michael Quinion article from Jim's link and keep on using the double genitive anyway as it's stuck in my head since schooldays. > link

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Originally Posted By: BranShea
I dug up the initial post
Originally Posted By: BranShea
Here's a little thing I longtime wanted to ask. You say:

I will be at my sister's.
She's a friend of my sister's.

In the first sentence this seems clearly to mean: "At my sister's " house or place.
The second form always struck me as odd. "a friend of my sister's" ... what?

Maybe I am making mistakes here, but I just would like to know the details about this. (thanks)

I reread the Michael Quinion article from Jim's link and keep on using the double genitive anyway as it's stuck in my head since schooldays. > link



"a friend of my sister" is good.


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A
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I have been looking back over this discussion, and there is one possible explanation that no-one has mentioned.

"A friend of my sister's" implies that my sister has two or more friends and we are referring to one of them. So we mean "a friend of [= from among] my sister's friends".

"Of" here means not "belonging to my sister's friends" but "part of the group of her friends". This is why we cannot say "the friend of my sister's" – there cannot be a group if she has only one friend.

So I think the double genitive is perfectly logical.

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Thank you, A C. That's my sense of the thing exactly.

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