genitive

Yes, it's genitive, but "course in" is more idiomatic English than "course of."

I mistook the genitive listing in Whitaker for a plural.

Again I think this is relatively less common in German, where the genitive case could be used instead.

My name for instance, "Örn", is "Arnar" in genitive case and thus if I had a son his surname would be "Arnarson" and my daughter's surname would be "Arnardóttir".

This means that students associate it with memorizing genitive and dative cases which is pretty boring.

If it ever had a nominative plural it would be vira, and out of anything, viri is its genitive singular.

"I have one apple" = "Mam jedno jabko" vs "I don't have apple" = "Nie mam jednego jabka"Heh, this one of my favourite rules to show off with, as it appears more complicated than it is. If you're negating a sentence with this structure, you always use the genitive case, hence jednego jabka.

The correct name apparently would be singular, plural, genitive plural, if I'm reading Wikipedia right, but that's a bit cumbersome to type every time.

Sure, but an idiomatic translation of the genitive expression would probably drop prepositions entirely and say "Latin language course".

Say what else you like about Southern American English, but we solve the second-person plural problem quite handily with nominative and oblique y'all, and genitive y'all's.

...would be called "Venerials" by the proper genitive form...I'm going to keep telling myself that your use of 'genitive' right next to 'Venerials' was entirely conscious and deliberate.

Certainly people such as myself who are strongly verbally oriented type the saxon genitive reflexively to reflect the spoken possessive-ization construct.

I had the impression it was a strong rule, but I also learned a lot of subjunctive and genitive forms that are pretty much unused in spoken German, so I didn't want to overstate the situation with time/manner/place sequencing in case it was a similar case of book-rules versus real life.

>And NO, the genitive case of the definite neutral pronoun is not done with an aposthrophePresumably, this is the technical term for the fact that, while it possesses something, "it" doesn't get an apostrophe like in "the user's comment" because it's a pronoun and not a real noun, and thus not worthy of the extra punctuation?Always found that confusing and arbitrary.