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

On 2006-05-08 03:06, Andrew Jarrette wrote:

> Are you sure the apostrophe-s
> didn't stand for /his/ and merely stood for -/es/ minus the /e/?

It's hard to be absolutely sure of anything, but the topic has been
debated in the literature and the current consensus (confirmed by the
testimony of EMod.E grammarians such as Butler and Ben Jonson) is that
the apostrophe was purely orthographic when it first came into use,
<-'s> being just a variant of <-s> at a time when <-es> (with the vowel
pronounced) was still possible as a rare and archaic variant. Note
Shakespeare's (or rather Shacksperes)
in Midsummer Night(')s Dream, etc., of course "corrected" to in
modern editions (at the expense of making the rhythm stumble). The
apostrophe was sometimes used in the plural as well: in the first two
Folios the title of Love's Labours Lost is written Lost>. Note that s-genitives like 'ass's' continued to be spelt
with <-es> well into the 18th c., when those like already had
the apostrophe.

The distinction between pl. and gen.sg. (and eventually
also gen.pl. arose during a period when the influence of
prescriptive grammarians was strong in literary English and fine
orthographic distinctions, no matter how artificial, had a fair chance
of being observed by "careful writers".

The acceptance of <'s> was no doubt facilitated by the fact that by the
17th c. the "group genitive" had come to be widely used, showing the
development of <-(e)s> from inflection to enclitic. This is different
from claiming that the new clitic was universally identified with ,
though an occasional identification of this kind must underlie the
origin of the his-genitive, known already in Middle English, cf. the
variation in Chaucer:

The Prologe of the Chanouns Yemannes Tale
Heere bigynneth the Chanouns Yeman his Tale

and (with the analogical her-genitive):

The Prologe of the Wyves Tale of Bathe
Heere endeth the Wyf of Bathe hir Prologe
Heere bigynneth the Tale of the Wyf of Bathe
Heere endeth the Wyves Tale of Bathe

Piotr
----------------------------------

 

Thanks for all the info.  I think you are really an Englishman pretending to be a Pole.  An Englishman who belongs at Oxford or Cambridge, for that matter, and who is the authority par excellence on the history of English, on Indo-European, and languages in general.

 

Andrew