From: Andrew Jarrette
Message: 44497
Date: 2006-05-08
There was a partial confusion between gen.sg. <-(e)s> (regionally also
<-is, -ys>) and enclitic , but of course forms like or
can't be explained in that way (one would expect
'er> and instead), not to mention genitives like
'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":
Piotr---------------------------I see, I stand corrected, the apostrophe did not originate as a short form of his, it merely stands for the elided vowel e. But if this is so, why do we not have an apostrophe before the -s of the plural, since this too once had -es in Middle English. If it is because writers wanted a means to distinguish the genitive ending from the plural, I would think they chose the genitive to have the apostrophe precisely because they imagined that the -(e)s was originally his, and the apostrophe serves to indicate the lost part of an entire independent word (like the apostrophes in it's and can't reflect the lost syllables of the independent words is and not, not merely the lost syllable of a suffix, as was -es of the plural (and as was not, as I believe, -es of the genitive, as it was perceived at that time, since it was often held to be actually the independent word his and not just a suffix). That's my reasoning on this subject. I read somewhere that the apostrophe-s 's stood for his, even though this was not its true origin. But you have corrected me. Are you sure the apostrophe-s didn't stand for his and merely stood for -es minus the e?Andrew
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