As you've learned, the personal pronoun of the 1st & 2nd person have 2 versions of the genitive plural:
1st Person Plural Genitive:
nostrum
nostrï
2nd Person Plural Genitive:
vestrum
vestrï
Question: When do you use nostrum/vestrum and when do you use nostrï/vestrï?
Answer:
Objective Genitive: nostrï/vestrï
Partitive Genitive: nostrum/vestrum
Question: What's an objective genitive?
Answer:
1) The philologists say:
- "Nouns of action, agency, and feeling govern the Genitive of the Object" (Allen & Greenough, section 348)
- "A noun, etc. in the genitive case, or its equivalent, whose semantic relation to a head noun is like that of an object to a transitive verb. " (The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Linguistics, Oxford University Press)
2) They mean:
- Turn the two nouns into a noun verb phrase where the noun that is not in the genitive becomes a verb
- If the noun in the genitive is the object of the verb in the new phrase, you have an objective genitive
- examples:
- love of country: ->he loves his country-> objective genitive (amor patriae)
- Their love of us: -> they love us -> objective genitive (amor nostrï)
Question: What is a partitive genitive
Answer:
1) The philologists say:
- "Words denoting a Part are followed by the Genitive of the Whole to which the part belongs" (Allen & Greenough, section 346)
2) They mean:
- Pretty much what they say - we still use the genitive of the whole (which is the easier name for the partitive genitive because the word that refers to the whole group is in the genitive) in English in phrases like, "five of them."
- Egs
- not one [nëmö] of you dared to kill the king - nëmö vestrum rëgem necäre audëbat.
Imber's note:
You will almost never mistranslate these genitives going from Latin to English - so do not sweat bullets on this point of grammar. When you're doing English to Latin sentences, however, this is the kind of thing that teachers love to torture you with.