This is not a question about the rules of using apostrophes to make the possessive form of a noun.
No, I am simply curious to learn how the custom came about. It is not obvious to me why 's should have been used in the first place to denote possessives. In the absence of the 's people would have said something like “the house of Robert” or “the house that Robert lives in”. Where did “Robert’s house” come from?
Well, I can’t give any examples from Old English, so I’ll use our other lingustic cousins.
Most Germanic languages use a form of ‘-s’ to indicate the genitive case, which shows possession-possessor relationships between nouns. Most modern Germanic languages work, simply enough, like English. “Karl’s house” in Danish would be Karls hus, for example, but I think huset af Karl is preferred, which would be ‘the house of Karl’. It’s a typical Germanic language, since every one I’ve looked at has the two ways of forming genitive-type constructions; I’m sure Norwegian and Swedish work similarly. Dutch Dopers, give your two guilders/Euros here, alsdublieft.
German has signifigantly more flexibility; I assume Old English had similar flexibility, since they are closely related and share very similar grammatical features. It was just a weird twitch in our linguistic evolution that we took the “Robert’s house” form in preference to “the house of Robert” form; almost every other language in the Germanic branch prefers the ‘house of Robert’ form.
And now I gracefully bow and wait for someone more knowledgable to take the baton and elaborate.
Er, yea… the way I always thought of it, romantic languages would do something like “casa de Robert,” but in, say, Russian, you have “dom Roberta” in the gen case. Forgive my lack of knowledge of Germanic languages, which are more relevant…
But none of that answers the apostraphe. WAG would be that we dropped the cases entirely at some point, but retained the genitive ending, then stylisticly added the ’ in
The apostrophe in a posessive serves exactly the same purpose as the apostrophe everywhere else - it indicates a missing letter
So “Robert’s house” is just a shorthand for the original proper way of expressing the posessive case: “Robertes house”
Of course, since it’s been hundreds of years since anything but an apostrophe was used to indicate a genitive ending in English, one would normally say that the ‘unabbreviated’ version is no longer actually correct English. But that’s where it comes from
Very interesting, and very helpful. Thanks!
Quite right, but you’re a bit off the mark with huset af Karl, which sounds more like the house built from Karl.