The discussion of possessive took me back to research I did years ago about
the history of the possessive apostophe.  It is so odd that the apostrophe
has two such different uses, showing omission and showing possession--and
combined with the different roles that the s ending plays, it certainly
confuses students.

The omission/contraction apostrophe dates back to the Greeks and in English
it became popular and relatively standard in the early 1600s; Shakespeare
contributed to the trend with "'tis" and so forth.  Around that time, this
omission use evolved into the possessive use as well through several
unplanned and haphazard routes.

One route was the reaction of grammarians to the unpleasant doubling of the
s sound when a plural became possessive; an s was omitted and an apostrophe
used (still indicating omission, but the new possessive sense became
implicit), as in The House of Lords, The Lord's House.

Another route to the possessive apostrophe was the contraction with the word
"his" when it came after the noun, as in "the king his son," "the king's
son."  (This theory was less popular at the time than it has been since.
The word "his" referred at the time to females as well as males, so there
were constructions such as "Her Grace his request.")

A final route was the dropping of the letter e from the spelling when it
became silent in the speaking; thus, "the Lordes Supper" before the
sixteenth century, "the Lords Supper" in the sixteenth when the e was no
longer pronounced, and "the Lord's Supper" at first to indicate an omission
and, by the eighteenth century (when the usage was standardized),
possession.

I also like to think that one historical circumstance that hastened all this
was the fact that through most of the seventeenth century, England was ruled
by kings whose name ended in s.  Two Charleses and two Jameses.  Imagine all
those court printers and London copy editors sitting around trying to give
some consistency to phrases like "King Charles's proclamation."  The
uncertainty that kicked off our discussion--about "Columbus's
discovery"--takes us back to the heart of the matter in the 1600s, when the
English were, like us, trying to reconcile those multiple s sounds with the
rational use of that ancient mark.


Brock

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