Re[2]: [tied] Re: Verner's Law (Germanic)

At 3:22:18 PM on Sunday, May 7, 2006, Miguel Carrasquer
wrote:

> On Sun, 07 May 2006 15:37:22 +0200, Piotr Gasiorowski
> <gpiotr@...> wrote:

>>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.

> But I'd suspect that "Gruppenflexion" genitives like "the
> king of England's" _do_ originate in enclitic "his" (and
> analogically "the queen of England's" as well).

I haven't any actual data on which to base an opinion, but
on the face of it it seems to me more likely that 'king of
England' is simply treated as a noun in its own right, to be
inflected like most other nouns, much as 'court martials'
often replaces 'courts martial'.

Brian