Re: prescriptive possessives

--- Nicholas Bodley <nbodley@...> wrote:

> On Tue, 04 Oct 2005 23:14:53 -0400, Anton Sherwood
> <bronto@...>
> wrote:
>
> > How long have we had a consistent distinction
> between -s, -'s and -s' ?
>
> Hoping I'm not too far off the track, as to topic --
> Over several decades
> (I'm almost 70), I've long seen the possessive of a
> name, for instance,
> ending in "s" omit the second "s", as in [Bates']
> (square brackets to
> replace quotes, here). That must have been a
> simplification of an earlier
> form, such as [Bates's]. However, we seem to be
> returning to the style of
> the last-stated example.

Ah that's something different. I've heard it's a
British vs American thing but it could just be one of
those signs that young people are driving the language
to ruin and so forth:

Older style:
's for singulars no matter the ending, and for
irregular plurals ending in something other than s:
child's, Bates's, children's, philosopher's

s' for plurals ending in s:
philosophers'

New style:
's for words not ending in s no matter if they are
singular or plural:
child's, children's, philosopher's

s' for words ending in s no matter if they are
singular or plural:
Bates', philosophers'

Personally I use the "old style".

But the question was how long was there any kind of
regular distinction, so how long has the "old style"
been around? I'm guessing in the order of a couple of
centuries.

Another relevant question is how long has the
apostrophe been used for possessives altogether? I'm
guessing slightly longer.

Andrew Dunbar.

> --
> Nicholas Bodley /*|*\ Waltham, Mass. (Not "MA")
> The curious hermit -- autodidact and polymath
> Dilettante student of writing systems
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http://en.wiktionary.org -- http://linguaphile.sf.net/cgi-bin/translator.pl



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