Hi folks –

The belief that the {‘s} stands for his is mistaken, but has a very long history, as is shown by the Shakespeare quote. The breakdown of the OE case system resulted in the phonetic merger of {-as} (nominative & accusative plural of masculine a-stems} and {-es} (genitive singular). By Middle English, things were a bit messy, since there were a number of competing ways of making a genitive (not all nouns in OE were masculine a-stems, and the reflexes of the other declensions were there as competition). The system we have now is the result of one pattern, the –s genitive, out-competing the others except for in certain fixed expressions (e.g. Lady Day).

However, I don’t know of any evidence (yes, I’m hedging here!) that speakers of Middle English thought there was a “missing vowel” – after all, literacy in Old English virtually disappeared after the Norman Conquest, so by the time people were writing Middle English, the vast majority of them would have had no idea what the Old English form would have been in the first place. Also, stable use of the apostrophe is a much, much later development (and may be temporary, judging by my students’ writing); MidE writers definitely used contractions, but more as a paper-saving device. Even in the early 1800s, people frequently omitted predictable parts of high-frequency words to save space (hence, “y’r obn’t srv’nt” as a letter closing). Since using an apostrophe to show possession actually increases the amount of space necessary, it isn’t motivated in the same way.

Bill Spruiell

Central Michigan University

­­­Hi,

I think that rather than either/or, we may have a case of two different currents feeding into our current apostrophe form for the genitive.  In the Old English of over one thousand years ago, the genitive (possessive) singular suffix form for what is termed “the masculine a-stem nouns” (the largest noun class in their elaborate case language) was –es.  I have seen it explained that our modern apostrophe plus “s” comes from that earlier case form (the “e” was dropped, and the apostrophe marks that deletion) .  But I have also seen the explanation that you gave.  Given that both forms “his” plus the noun that is possessed, and the earlier form “-es” inflected on the noun preceding the possessed noun, I think it is possible that both forms may have contributed to our current form.   

Dallin D. Oaks

Brigham Young University

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