[Gllug] re: grammar

[Nix]

[disclaimer: I am not trained in linguistics, but just an interested
amateur. I think we have Real Linguists here; probably one of them
should pop up and tell me I'm full of crap.]

On Thu, 9 Sep 2004, Pete Ryland stated:
> On Fri, Sep 03, 2004 at 12:48:14PM +0100, Dylan wrote:
>> On Friday 03 Sep 2004 12:30 pm, Ian Scott wrote:
>> > >  The /-'s/ is only ever acceptable as the posessive marker.
>> >
>> > Except in it's, where is it NEVER acceptable as the posessive marker!
>> 
>> Except that here it isn't /-'s/, which is very specifically the 
>> morphological suffix for posession (and to be pedantic, NOT genitive.) 
>> Neither "it's" nor "its" have a suffix of any kind. "It's" is a 
>> contraction of two words, and "its" is a 'synthetic' form which happens 
>> to end in an /s/.
> 
> To be quite precise, the possessive -'s suffix is indeed actually a
> contraction -- for the possesive pronoun.  For example:
> 
> John's book is green. == John, his book is green.

Although it was common to use structures like `by hym self his
departynge', my understanding is that this is not the origin of our
current possessive forms, and that 's is directly descended from
older genitive case suffixes.


Let's start in the far past. Case endings in Old English looked like,
well, I don't know it well so I'll just point you at
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_English_language#Nouns> which has a
nifty table.

A few centuries later, Chaucer was still using an inflected form,
e.g. (from _Troilus & Criseyde_)

169    Among thise othere folk was Criseyda,
170    In widewes habit blak, but natheles,

although even then virtually all nouns were treated identically: most
nouns with irregularly formed genitive endings in Old English had lost
that irregularity, and it was turning into a `just suffix it with -es'
system. The plural genitive case had been reduced to `-e' or `-en'. (The
Wikipedia article is again good:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_English>.)

By very late Middle English / early Modern this had been reduced to
`just suffix with -s' e.g. (from Caxton's _Blanchardyn and Eglantine_)

`prosterned or casted her self doune byfore her faders feet' (1489 ed.)

or (a century later, we're in early Modern times now)

`of his departure from his Fathers Court' (1595 ed.)

but by then the apostrophe was growing rapidly in use; Shakespeare used
the inflected forms rarely. We now use "a just suffix it with -' or -'s"
system everywhere but on the pronouns (those that are left!)


There's some interesting stuff on the genitive case in late Middle
English in
<http://www.hti.umich.edu/cgi/c/cme/cme-idx?type=HTML&rgn=DIV2&byte=1416721>
(search for `The Genitive Case').

The only remaining things in English that are inflected in the
possessive are the pronouns, and a bloody mess they are too; people of
all levels of erudition have been getting the possessive case of
pronouns wrong for as long as modern English has existed and probably
before that.

> Two weeks' worth of rain. == Two weeks, its worth of rain.

Plain genitive case:

Two weeks' worth of rain == two weeks worth of rain

The `Joe's dog' == `Joe his dog' is easily refuted, because it only
works for third person possession by men.

`Jane's cat', er, oops, `Jane his cat', I don't think so, and `Jane her
cat' would have yielded `Jane'r cat'!

(It fails similarly for the first and second persons, and plurals.)

-- 
`The copyright file is for everyone.  That we make it available in
 plain-text, uncompressed form rather than in spinning, throbbing
 OpenGL-rendered 3D text over a thumping dance music soundtrack is a
 feature, not a bug.' --- Branden Robinson

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