If an apostrophe signals that there are letters omitted in order to shorten groups of words into contractions (as in “you’re correct”), what letters, if any, are omitted in order to express possession (as in “Jessica’s game”)
If there are no omitted letters, then what is the linguistic history of this form?
The use of the letter S to indicate possession dates from Old English, when the language was still highly inflected like German. The genetive case, which indicated possession, was chacterized by the -es ending for masculine and neuter singular nouns. This was from the time the “English” first arrived in England to about 1066, the Norman conquest.
The use of -'s for possessives was nearly universal by the time of Early Modern English (Shakespeare’s day). Likely, the apostrophe was added to differentiate plurals from possessives. However, there are no omitted letters- it descends directly from the -es ending used in the genetive case in Old English.
English was dispensing with inflections even by the late Old English period, with -'s surviving today as one of the few inflectional endings we still use.
If, as you say, it descends directly from the -es ending, wouldn’t the e be the missing letter?
While the E was indeed deleted, I don’t think the apostrophe represents it. There are plenlty of examples of possessives from English that only have the -s ending. The apostrophe was added after the -s ending had already arisen.
Also, it occurs to me that to say the E “disappeared” isn’t quite accurate. The -es ending, as I said, was the genetive case marker for masculine and neuter singular nouns, and those nouns only. Feminine and plural nouns had other endings for the genitive case. The -es ending changed to -s as it generalized to all other nouns and gained an apostrophe, kinda becoming a new inflection based on the old one, rather than the same old one a bit different.
Ah, ok. I know very little about it and wondered if you had missed something obvious. You hadn’t.
Was this the result of a sound change that weakened unstressed <e>? I suspect that the <e> probably disappeared because of a phonetic change that made it silent (and not orthographically necessary like the etymological <e> at the end of a lot of words.) Just speculating, though.
Anyway, there’s no letter being omitted here at all; some linguist or another (can’t remember where I read it right now) has remarked that the apostrophe is really just the twenty-seventh letter of the alphabet. The apostrophe doesn’t really represent omitted letters in English, anyway - the contractions used in speech are more realistically words in their own right (after all, how else can you explain the spelling of “won’t”?)
Thanks for the information. I can always rely on my fellow Dopers to have answers to even the most obscure questions.
Admittedly there is no verb “wo”. And I don’t know whether “willn’t” or “win’t” ever had any popularity. But surely that’s just one little oddity, an exception that doesn’t disprove the rule?
You will find in many Middle English texts the word “his” denoting posession, as in Malory’s Morte Darthur:
Thus the apostrophe in some cases does represent a contraction of the earlier form.
I don’t know, and can’t find anything about it, but it sounds plausible. Unstressed vowels in English, after the Old English period, were nearly all reduced to the “uh” (shwa) sound, making them supremely unimportant, though not silent.
My source (A Biography of the English Language by CM Millward) informs me that that form is a result of people mistaking a mistake.
That the apostrophe does not represent a possessive is obvious in that, while you see “the king’s castle” (which could be the king his castle), you never see “the queen’r castle” (the queen her castle) or “the monarch’eir castle” (the monarchs their castel). The possessive form “the king his castle” also did not appear until the -s/-'s ending had become widespread, highly suggesting that its use was a misinterpretation, i.e. a later, not earlier, form.
Of course, that should read “the apostrophe does not represent a possessive adjective.” :smack:
Seems I was mistaken; think I’ll look up Millward’s book.
Umm, German came in with the Angles and the Saxons in the late 4th century. What came in after the Battle of Hastings (1066) was French (and thus, indirectly, Latin).