From: Miguel Carrasquer
Message: 44494
Date: 2006-05-07
>At 3:22:18 PM on Sunday, May 7, 2006, Miguel CarrasquerMy opinion is likewise not based on any actual data about
>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'.That's just because the NAdj order is foreign to English.