The History of the Russian Genitive Case.

[TaiLiu]

Which is to say, there might not be one. To clarify: I have been researching into the history of the Russian language, and I want to know where, when, and how the Russian language started to use the Genitive case. Unfortunately, my digging has turned out to be fruitless, and I'll starting to think that its either lost to history or it came pre-packaged with the language.

Has anyone seen anything about the history of the case, or is my chase a foolish and impossible one?

[Aedilred]

From what I understand, and I'm by no means an expert, the general trend with Indo-European languages is that they have shed cases over time rather than acquired them. I certainly can't think of any examples where a language has spontaneously developed a new case. This might be an instance of asking the wrong question.

In any case, since there's not much in the way of written history of the language from before the late first millennium AD, and from what I gather the genitive was in use at that time, the chances are that it's going to be difficult, if not impossible, to discover its origin anyway.

[BWR]

Only an Old English philologist, I'm afraid, so I can't help you with specifics.
However, I am interested in this, and would be interested in hearing any results you come up with.

But, to show my blazing ignorance of Russian language, what, excatly, is the problem?
Is it a matter of the way Russian genitives work is quite a bit different from other related languages and you want to find out how this developed?
In that case, all I can suggest is finding the oldest texts you can and start there and then just read until your eyes bleed, finding every example of the genitive you can and see what sort of patterns emerge.
Sometimes, as I can attest from personal experience, there just isn't enough information to work with.
And sometimes you find what you are looking for, hopefully something someone else hasn't noticed yet (or written about, at least).

[Asta Kask]

Proto-Indo-European has genitive case ending in -es/-os/-s; osjo in singular and -om in plural.

[Jay R]

Which is to say, there might not be one. To clarify: I have been researching into the history of the Russian language, and I want to know where, when, and how the Russian language started to use the Genitive case. Unfortunately, my digging has turned out to be fruitless, and I'll starting to think that its either lost to history or it came pre-packaged with the language.

Has anyone seen anything about the history of the case, or is my chase a foolish and impossible one?

It probably started to use the genitive case back in Proto-Indo-European, the ancient language that Russian (and Latin, Greek, German, etc.) evolved out of.

Proto-Indo-European is believed to have had a genitive case, long before Russian developed out of it.

Most major branches of the Indo-European language tree have had it since very early times. Specifically, all Slavic languages except Macedonian and Bulgarian have the genitive case.

A theory that Russian didn't have one would need to explain losing it and then re-gaining it - which seems unlikely to me, though this is not my field of study.