The Wisdom of Solomon (a thinking post)

[rochvelleth]

Well, I was surprised that I didn't actually die through lack of LJ yesterday. In fact, I found not being able to check it quite liberating. It even allowed me to get some work done

Comments

[ewx]

Robert Burchfield, The English Language:

[Robert] Lowth regarded the genitive 's in ‘God's grace’ as an improper shortening of -is, i.e. ‘Godis grace’.

We now very improperly always shorten it with an Apostrophe, even tho' we are obliged to pronounce it fully; as ‘Thomas's book:’ that is, ‘Thomasis book;’ not ‘Thomas his book,’ as it is commonly supposed.

David Crystal, The Stories Of English:

By Johnson's time [...] punctuation is the main feature which is still variable, notably in relation to the apostrophe, which is sometimes present and sometimes not (Jonson's and Jonsons both used by Dryden) and used in places it would not occur today (e.g. embrio's for embryos, it's for its).

(Rather entertaining that things so widely decried as errors today might justifiably be called anachronisms.)

Lynne Truss, Eats, Shoots and Leaves mentions the theory that it's a contracted ‘his’, but isn't convinced and points out that the “rationalisation falls down noticeably when applied to female possessives”. Given the obvious relationship to

[vyvyan]

Lynne Truss, Eats, Shoots and Leaves mentions the theory that it's a contracted ‘his’, but isn't convinced

Oh, this is positively ludicrous! It's not even worth evaluating as a competing theory - there is an unbroken line of indisputable written evidence for the origin of the modern possessive marker in the old genitive singular of o-stem nouns in -es, going back to Old English! For instance (from OED, example of "man's"):

Genitive singular: (a) OE-ME monnes, OE-16 mannes, ME manes, mannus, mones, monnis, monnys, ME-15 manis, mannys, ME-16 mannis, mans, 16- man's; Sc. pre-17 mannis, mannys, 17- man's

Derivation in "his" is only a competing theory if you're the sort of person who believes Genesis provides a competing scientific theory for the origin of life. I doubt that any academic present-day linguistics text will consider such an etymology seriously (yet another reason not to view Truss as a linguist :-).

A fairly detailed account of the development of possessive forms in early Modern English is given in Charles Barber,

[ewx]

To be fair in this particular case I think Truss only mentioned it in order to dismiss it. (Which isn't to say anything either way about the rest of the book.) As for your remarks on the history of the possessive, thankyou, that was interesting.

[cartesiandaemon]

*hug* Thank you for the party, it was great. We're sorry you paid for it, I hope it was worth it.

I loved the story of Soloman. And at some point, someone pointed out how stupid it was. If the second woman loves the baby as much, it obviously doesn't work, and if she's devious *at all* ishe does the same thing. But it's like a parable, making the fundamental point.

(And at some point, people are just stupid enough not to be able to support sufficient levels of deception.)