Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 1999/11/07
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]At 08:40 AM 11/7/1999 +0000, you wrote: >Right. Which meant WHAT? Why add "-es"? "Marces" = "Marc his." I don't >believe most linguistic scholars (great ones or not) rely entirely on >textual evidence of early language, since illiteracy was the common >condition and written notation was both rare and entirely >unstandardized. It's an inflected ending, Mike. It has nothing directly to do with "his". Old English was an inflected language, like German, Latin, Russian, or Ancient Greek. I'm relatively well read in Old and Middle English, and the construction you suggest -- "Marc, his bucu", simply does not exist, while "Marces bucu" is relatively common, though a dative of possession is encountered on occasion, as well. In other words, the inflected ending, "-es" (cognate, incidentally, to the original Indo-European genitive in "-s", as seen in Sanskrit and Greek and in frozen Latin forms such as Pater Familias) became slurred and the apostrophe indicates the missing vowel. It's just that clear and clean. (For that matter, the "-s" genitive ending can still be found in modern German and, I believe, Dutch, the closest cousins to English.) Occam's Razor slices only one way here, Mike. No reputable scholar has ever even considered your suggestion, and heaven only knows whence you derive it. The entire body of students of Old and Middle English for several hundred years has explained the possessive apostrophe in Modern English as being derived from the residual inflected ending in "-s". See, inter multa alia, Quirk & Wrenn, AN OLD ENGLISH GRAMMAR, Sweet's OLD ENGLISH PRIMER, Wrenn, THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE, Blakely, TEACH YOURSELF OLD ENGLISH, Mallory, IN SEARCH OF THE INDO-EUROPEANS, and Shiller, A NEW COMPARATIVE GRAMMAR OF GREEK AND LATIN, for discussion. Marc msmall@roanoke.infi.net FAX: +540/343-7315 Cha robh bas fir gun ghras fir!