At 5:51:38 AM on Tuesday, April 20, 2004, Richard Wordingham
wrote:
[...]
> Double genitives in themselves are not unknown - "a friend
> of my father's", for an English example, [...]
> Incidentally, do we know how this English idiom developed?
> Is it truly a reduction of "a friend of my father's
> friends"?
I'd be very much surprised if it were. My guess is that the
preposition alone doesn't convey a sufficiently strong
feeling of possession, so the <'s> is added for emphasis.
It would be interesting to know for which X <a friend of
my/a(n) X's> is likely; I'd be surprised to hear <a friend
of my/a friend's>, and I suspect that <a friend of my
family's> is less common relative to <a friend of my family>
than <a friend of my father's> is relative to <a friend of
my father>.
Brian