On 2006-05-07 04:19, Andrew Jarrette wrote:
> I find it funny that you have suggested this, since it is identical
> to the reason why English spells its genitive singular with an
> apostrophe before the /s/: it was held to be a reduced form of
> /his/, e.g. "The King's English" was held to actually stand for "The
> King his English". But I believe most scholars have rejected this
> idea, and believe that the apostrophe-s is the modern reflex of the
> Old English genitive singular ending -/es/. I could be wrong, however.
There was a partial confusion between gen.sg. <-(e)s> (regionally also
<-is, -ys>) and enclitic <his>, but of course forms like <queen's> or
<children's> can't be explained in that way (one would expect <queen
'er> and <children their> instead), not to mention genitives like
<wives> 'wife's' (with the historically word-medial treatment of the
fricative), common before the late 18th c. In fact, the consistent use
of the apostrophe in the geninitive was established very late (in the
final decades of the 17th c.) and was practically unknown e.g. to
Shakespeare. The function of the apostrophe was originally to indicate
the deletion of the vowel of the ending, and the employment of the
spelling <-'s> in a grammatical function is a typical example of
linguistic "exaptation":
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exaptation
Some parts of the convention (the use of the apostrophe even after
sibilants, where the vowel continued to be pronounced, or the
distinction between <lady's> and <ladies'>, etc.) are still later (18th c.).
Piotr