Posessive or not?

0Hello, Bia, welcome to the Forums!02br
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00I think you need a hyphen in your first example: a two-hour delay.02br
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00I can't answer the second part of your question, sorry.0-

0Pieanne, thanks for your comment, this must be true.02br
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00P.S. I'm sorry about the spelling mistake in the title...0-

0I agree with pieanne on the hyphen.02br
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00The possessive in the second one is awfully strange to me. Where did you 01b00come across02b00 (not 'come over') that?02br
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00As for omitting the indefinite article: offer an example where you think it might be unnecessary.0-

0Bia, in this case, it's not a spelling mistake, it's a typo! 05002br
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00I think the possessive case can be used to express durations, lengths, ...02br
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00"a two hours' wait"02br
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00"a 100 miles' drive"010id1

0Pieanne, 02br
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00I stand corrected. I was thinking: how does time possess waitng, and how do miles possess driving, and how do hours possess delays.02br
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00Apparently, this kind of speculation does not apply.0-

0 I'm afraid it's just a matter of grammar... 0-

0You do need a hyphen between 2 and hour. 02br
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00(We have) a 2-hour delay.02br
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00"2-hour" functions as an adjective. It describes what kind of delay we have. So in this case the delay is 2 hours long.02br
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00More examples of this.02br
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001. He ran the 100-meter dash at the athletic meet.02br

0Davkett, thanks, that was a silly mistake("came over")!02br
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00Thank you all, it's clear to me about structures with a hyphen.02br
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00As for the other variant, possessive (or genitive?) is probably a wrong term. I came across these examples - 00ten minutes' break, an hour's drive 00etc00. 00in A.J.Thomson's,A.V.Martinet's Practical

0 I stand corrected in my opinion on the variant form. Pieanne is correct. The two examples in the book you cited would not be obsolete. 0-

0 Thanks, everybody! 0-