Posesivní Genitiv Redivivus

In the contemporary Czech, in both spoken and especially in written form, possessive adjectives are replaced by possessive genitives, which are originally colloquial constructions only. In the last stage of this development, the postpositive genitive changes into prepositive: Klárčina maminka, maminka Klárky, Klárky maminka (‘Klárka’s mother’). The Czech language thus loses another means of inflection and gets closer to an agglutinative language type. This change (deflective tendency) is also supported by the loss of introflexion, i.e. the loss of morphophonological alternations, in our example k – č, in other cases r – ř, g – ž, ch – š, etc. (Klárčin – Klárky [‘Klárka’s’], sestra – sestřin [‘sister’s’], Olga – Olžin [‘Olga’s’] etc.).