concerning あ こ そ words


Out of curiosity I looked up その in a monolingual dictionary, the first thing I
see Is ［連体］《代名詞「そ」＋格助詞「の」から》What on earth is a "case marking particle"? Is
this the の particle that simply means "of"?

So, if I were to translate it literally, a phrase like その上 would mean "above
of that" "on top of that" while "その人" "person of that" Sounds like complete
gibberish to me when I try to think of it that way though.




A 格助詞【かくじょし】 or "case-marking particle" is a particle that attaches to a noun
form to mark how the word relates to the rest of the sentence or clause. There
are several, including ～は, ～が, ～を, etc.

～の is a confusing one because there are _several **different** particles_ all
pronounced 「の」, but in this case, I believe it marks the genitive case,
generally used for possession.

In this particular case, the given analysis of 《代名詞「こ」＋格助詞「の」から》 is only
applicable to Old Japanese, as 此【こ】 -- originally a pronoun (代名詞【だいめいし】) -- is
no longer used by itself.

Now, この, その, あの, and どの are simply fully-fledged pronouns. (Incidentally, this
is all basically true of the other suffixes originally attached to these
pronoun bases, including これ, ここ, どっち, etc.)

