Old English (aka Anglo-Saxon) was a highly inflected tongue apparently. That is to say, the nouns, not just the verbs, took on many different endings. In fact, if you saw something written in Old English, you’d hardly recognize it. (Just to see what I mean, here is the Lord’s Prayer, in Old English.)
Anyways, Middle and Modern English dropped most of these word endings–except the possessive case.
Just to give a little background on what I am talking about, Old English was similar to Modern Latin in this regard. Modern Latin has what are called cases, usually to relate to where words appear in the sentence. There is the Nominative Case (Subject), the Dative Case (Indirect Object) and the Accusative Case (Direct Object). There also is the Ablative (meaning “removal”, I believe) and the Genitive–which is what our possessive case comes from. Not Latin of course, but the Genitive Case in Old English.
But we don’t hold on to these case endings anymore. Our word relations are designated by word order and prepostions. Yet we still hold on to the Possessive Case. My question: Why?
There’s no reason why at all. It’s just something that English speakers collectively maintained. It could just as easily have happened that English came to mark possessives by word order (as in “headlinese”), or with a preposition. But logic and a priori scheming really have nothing at all with the form of natural human languages.
Possibly because it’s useful. It’s convenient that “It is her” differs from “It is hers.”
The normal possessive case for nouns is just a contraction. For example, “John’s boat” is a contraction of “John his boat”. The latter has long since passed from the language, of course.
It is clearly a case ending. We and the other Indo-European languages mark cases by attaching sounds to the end of the root, but that doesn’t make them something other than case endings.
John’s boat was never a contraction of John his boat. This is folk etymology that’s been around for a long time. The enclitic 's is from the Anglo-Saxon genitive form
A lot of simplification in English occurred as an effect of the Norse/Norman invasions. Inflections that weren’t common to Old English, Norse and/or French tended to get lost.
“s” seems to have been common and simple enough that it managed to stick around.
Nope. Without the possessive, the language would have evolved anyway to avoid this kind of confusion, and you would probably say something like “It is of her”.
In most cases, languages do not evolve become some authorization power directs them to. They change or not change according to the needs of their speakers. Other cases could be dropped, and would still be intelligible by context and word order, but the genitive was still useful to avoid ambiguity or misunderstandings, so people kept on using it.
Assume that any question about why a language does something, the answer is Because it worked well that way for the people using the language.
My understanding is that since we can separate it from head nouns in noun phrases (The king of england’s horse, rather than the king’s of england horse even though the horse is possessed by the king and not england as an example) implies that it is not a true case ending.
Interesting, but how does that account for the fact that you can also say “king’s horse” and that the form “king’s” is identical to the historical genitive from which it sprang? Once it is able to cut loose from its root and go modifying entire phrases, does that mean it ceases to be a case ending, or that it is both a case ending and a clitic derived from the case ending? I would say the latter, but I can see why the former might also be appealing, particularly if (as in English) only one case is marked in nouns anyway.
It is not really a case ending, as observed. Consider the sentence: The son of king’s daughter is the daughter of the king’s son. It is 4 ways ambiguous, but two of the ways are tautologous and the other two are contradictory. The point is that the 's can apply to an entire noun phrase or to just the preceding and when the latter is not the head of noun phrase, you get ambiguity.
As to why it hung on, well it just did. There are three honest inflections left in English: the plural, the third singular of the present tense and preterite/past participle of the verb.
That didn’t answer the question I had, but I have to say your example is only ambiguous in writing. When I say (the daughter of the king)'s (son) vs (the daughter) of (the king’s son), there is a different amount of stress on “daughter.”
400 years ago one sees phrases like “Henry V was sundry times played by the Right Honorable the Lord Chamberlain his players.”
Could the clitic possessive have arisen simply as a contraction of the underlined words?
(I realize the clitic was already in use then, but the quoted usage might be an obsolescent vestige of its origin.)
As already pointed out in this thread, no, it couldn’t. (A) It’s much older than that. (b) While its marginally plausible that “John his boat” could be contracted to “John’s boat”, it’s not plausible that “Jane her boat” could be so contracted. And how are we to account for the word “its”, the possessive form of it? A contraction of “it his”? (c) The possessive ‘s’ occurs in other Germanic languages, even thought the masculine possessive pronoun in those languages doesn’t look anything like “his”, or anything that is likely to be contracted to ‘s’.
It’s the other way around. Constructions like “John his boat” are an erroneous back-formation produced by people who are attempting to write either formally or archaically and who wrongly assume that the apostrophe before the genitive ‘s’ indicates a contraction. They attempt to construct something that it could be a contraction of, and “John his boat” is what they come up with.
The Old English possessive was an -es ending: Johnes cow. It was an additional syllable. The syllable was elided so it was no longer separate: John-es cow to Johns cow… The apostrophe indicates this.
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