Certainly in Modern Norwegian, the structure works:
Johan, hans far er Johannes. or
Johan sin far er Johannes. or
Johans far er Johannes. All mean the same:
" Johan's father is Johannes."
Sara
At 01:57 PM 1/26/2007, Linda DiDesidero wrote:
Someone who has studied
German linguistics can probably answer this better than I, but let me
throw a factoid and question into the pot.
In German, you can say:
--Max dessen Vater (Max his father/ Max's father)
--Helga deren Vater (Helga her father/ Helga's father)
As I understand it, these are rather old fashioned constructions, but
people still use them.
It would make sense to think that "Mars his sword" derives from
the same place. And Dallin's comment about the 'es' in Old English
genitive would be consistent with 'dessen' for masculine in German.
Does anyone know more?
Linda
-----Original Message-----
From: [log in to unmask]
To: [log in to unmask]
Sent: Tue, 23 Jan 2007 1:17 PM
Subject: Re: his genitive
Jan. 23, 2007
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 iit 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
From: Assembly for the Teaching of
English Grammar
[
mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Jane Saral
Sent: Tuesday, January 23, 2007 8:49 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: his genitive
A colleague has sent us the following query, and I thought I'd see what
the experts of this body have to say on the matter:
Folks, I was enmeshed in Shakespeare's sonnet #54 and pointed out that
"Mars his sword" reminds us the possessive apostrophe is there
to show letters have been omitted, whereupon one student said he
understood that was an urban legend. "John's Mini Cooper" did
not historically replace "John his Mini," he said. I love it
when students teach the teacher, but this one is new to me. Anybody know
the real scoop???
Jane Saral
The Westminster Schools
Atlanta, GA
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