barryg@sdcrdcf.UUCP (Lee Gold) (04/03/85)
Summary:
Expires:
Sender:
Followup-To:
Distribution:
Keywords:
Contrary to a recent assertion, the English possessive did NOT begin as a
contraction of (Noun + his) [e.g. "the ship his mast," "Mary his flowers"].
Anyone doubting this should feel free to look at any Low Germanic language
(Nederlandisch, Frisian) or directly at Anglo Saxon. However the netter is
not alone in making this false assumption. The Elizabethans (never
renowned as linguists) fell into the same error.
Of course, the Elizabethans labored under the burden of not having a
separate possessive for the neuter singular third person pronoun (it).
Anglo Saxon had used the forms hit (nominative) and his (possessive).
Elizabethan English fluxuated between using "it" and "his" as the possessive
of "it," before finally evolving to the Modern regular form of "its."
Please notice that pronouns do NOT use an apostrophe to make the
possessive. That's only for nouns (which need some indication that they're
not in the plural). An increasing number of people seem unsure of how to
spell a possessive noun. I've seen a car rental parking plot with a sign
saying:
VISITOR`S' CARS
Others are unsure of how to make a plural. Traditionally plurals of
numbers and acronyms are made with ('s) [e.g. two 4x5's, four TV's].
I've seen signs saying:
FIVE FOOT SOFA'S FOR SALE
Sometimes I feel nostalgiac for the old days of prescriptive dictionaries
when I could say that such usages were *W*R*O*N*G* instead of merely
that they are becoming more and more frequently used.
--Lee Gold