fandomsecrets | [ SECRET POST #2747 ]

⌈ Secret Post #2747 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

01.

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02.

[The Hobbit/Thorin Oakenshield]

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03.

[The Vincent Black Shadow]

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04.

[El Goonish Shive]

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06.

[Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries]

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11.

[Penny Dreadful]

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[Supernatural]

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14.

[Blake's 7]

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15.

[Edge of Tomorrow/Tom Cruise]

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16.

[Quirk]

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17.

[Homestuck]

18. [WARNING for rape]

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19. [WARNING for rape]

Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 00 pages, 000 secrets from Secret Submission Post #392.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 1 - broken links ], [ 1 2 (tw: rape) - not!secrets ], [ 1 (?) - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ], [ 1 - ships it ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

A few years ago, a history professor explained that the possessive 's, which I wondered about ever since I learned what contractions were, was originally also a contraction. According to him, the linguistic intermediary or whatever between "the house of John" and "John's house" was "John his house". And I guess constructs like "Mary'r house" never took off because, well, the whole women and property thing back then.

I thought this was a fascinating bit of trivia (if it's true) at the time, but just now I realized it's also hilarious, because if it is true, and tumblr finds out...ohhh boy. We could start seeing a movement to abolish 's and replace it with 'r, and that would be a glorious train wreck.

I have no idea how you would say Mary'r. I'm just pronouncing it MAAAAAAR in my head and I know that's wrong.

Marry 'er.

Now I'm trying to think of how one would pronounce that possessive with a name ending in a consonant. Elizabeth'r house?

It would probably go the same way as we do now with the possessive of names that end with "s," by adding an "e" sound before it.

Sorry to spoil it, anon, but Barhart Encyclopedia of Etymology says that 's is just a descendant from the the Old English possessive case, where it was es, as in "Johnes".

Beware random people telling you etymologies. Most often, it's just something that sounds plausible or funny.

And it occurs to me that that sounded way snottier than I meant it. So, I'm sorry for that.

Thank you. I cannot stand cutesy fake etymologies.

I have seen 17th century documents that use 'John his house'...

If you can find an example, that would be helpful. I've just looked it up, and I'm only getting mentions like this, point #3, which says that the "John his house" did occur, but that ~~it came from a misunderstanding about the already-present apostrophe~~ (Sorry, I got that wrong) people misheard "Johnes" for "John his", and that became popular and the mostly not-grammatically-minded people got more confused. This link gives a good rundown of the history.

The Old English form was in place before the 12th century, and the evolution of es to 's since then is very well documented. Before then, we just wouldn't have the written records to support that claim.

Edited 2014-07-12 01:18 (UTC)

Chiming in to add something for anyone else on this thread who's interested:

One thing people tend to forget about historical linguistics is that there wasn't much in the way of systemic and uniform education up until the last century or two, and even then it was very class-biased until around the WWII era and after. People were more likely to play around with the spelling, or write things as they sounded instead - and they wouldn't necessarily be wrong, depending on time period, because there wasn't always a single unified institution creating set standards of what even is right or wrong, and thus creating linguistic unity. The closest thing was the church, and even that didn't always go very far.

There are still parts of the world today where being able to write your own name counts as being literate, even if you can't read or write anything else. Up until a few centuries ago, this was about how literate most English-speaking people were, given that even in the middle and upper classes, literacy wasn't a given - forget the lower class that the vast majority of the population was usually in.

In other words, a few instances of people hearing "Johnes" and writing "John his" is the equivalent of a historian from the future looking back on our own time period and assuming we spelled the 2nd person pronoun as "u" because some people on Facebook don't know how to spell "you".

Yep, that's it.

[ SECRET POST #2747 ]

Remembered something I learned in history once

Re: Remembered something I learned in history once

Re: Remembered something I learned in history once

Re: Remembered something I learned in history once

Re: Remembered something I learned in history once

Re: Remembered something I learned in history once

Re: Remembered something I learned in history once

Re: Remembered something I learned in history once

Re: Remembered something I learned in history once

Re: Remembered something I learned in history once

Re: Remembered something I learned in history once

Re: Remembered something I learned in history once