From: Brian M. Scott
Message: 44495
Date: 2006-05-07
> On Sun, 07 May 2006 15:44:44 -0400, "Brian M. Scott"That's the motivation; the fact that it *can* be done,
> <BMScott@...> wrote:
>>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
> My opinion is likewise not based on any actual data about
> English, but on that of other Germanic languages, where you
> simply cannot add genitive -s to a compund noun phrase. In
> Dutch, however, it _is_ possible to say "de koning van
> Engeland z'n ..." (and "de koningin van Engeland d'r ...").
>>, much as 'court martials' often replaces 'courts martial'.
> That's just because the NAdj order is foreign to English.