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As far as I know:
(1) my friend's car - correct
(2) a car of my friend's - correct
(3) a car of my friend - incorrect

I'm curious about whether the correctness will remain the same if I add "one of":
(4) one of my friends' car - Is it still correct?
(5) a car of one of my friends' - Is it still correct?
(6) a car of one of my friends - Is it still incorrect?

(The question is about whether "one of" affects the genitive.)

an update:
I wrote "a car of my friend" is incorrect because:
forum.wordreference.com: the sentence "That's a car of John." is incorrect.
Therefore, I think, the sentence "That's a car of my friend." is incorrect too.
Therefore, I'm inferring, the phrase "a car of my friend" is an incorrect phrase.

Loviii
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  • Why use a possessive in 5)? A car of one of my friends. There is no possessive there. A car of my friend was entered in the race. – Lambie Jan 15 '24 at 17:24
  • You are the OP. There is no end of the OP. – Lambie Jan 15 '24 at 18:11
  • @Lambie You wrote the sentence "A car of my friend was entered in the race." is correct. I made an update at the end of the original post. There is the sentence "That's a car of my friend." which is incorrect. Why is the phrase "a car of my friend" in your sentence correct and in mine is not? Thanks. – Loviii Jan 15 '24 at 18:16
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    There is nothing intrinsically wrong with: a car of my friend, which is why I provided the example in my first comment but the fact is we'd generally use: my friend's car in most cases. – Lambie Jan 15 '24 at 18:17
  • 1 is correct. 2 is incorrect. 3 is correct but not idiomatic. Beyond that, "my friend's car" avoids trying to say you have a lot of friends. – Weather Vane Jan 15 '24 at 20:26
  • What Lambie said (there's nothing intrinsically wrong with: *a car of my friend). It's just that we normally say my friend's car*. Also note that "double possessive" usages are common in English. See Why say "of x's" instead of "of x"? – FumbleFingers Jan 15 '24 at 20:33
  • Technically correct or not, (4), (5) and (6) all sound a bit unnatural. In real life we would say something like "a car belonging to one of my friends" or "John's car (that's one of my friends)". – Kate Bunting Jan 16 '24 at 09:21

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