Timeline for When did it become incorrect to use apostrophes with possessive pronouns?
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| Jun 15, 2020 at 7:40 | history | edited | CommunityBot |
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| Jun 29, 2013 at 2:14 | history | reopened |
Joel Brown Mitch MetaEd Hellion tchrist♦ |
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| Jun 28, 2013 at 16:38 | history | edited | user46705 | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
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| Jun 28, 2013 at 11:34 | history | edited | user46705 | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
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| Jun 27, 2013 at 15:41 | history | closed |
tchrist♦ MetaEd Kristina Lopez Matt E. Эллен choster |
Duplicate of Origins of possessive pronouns | |
| Jun 27, 2013 at 15:15 | comment | added | FumbleFingers | This question is based on a false premise that at any given time there's a definitive set of rules governing what is or isn't correct orthography. Clearly we all have no hesitation in saying her's is "incorrect" today, but 2-3 centuries ago it was at least "acceptable" to some (always, the minority). | |
| Jun 27, 2013 at 15:11 | comment | added | FumbleFingers | Maybe it's not exactly a duplicate of the one Mari-Lou posted, but I still think this answer to Why doesn't “its” have an apostrophe? pretty much covers it. Austen was writing when the (ultimately, doomed) fad for her's was quite widespread. But it was never dominant | |
| Jun 27, 2013 at 14:26 | answer | added | sjy | timeline score: 9 | |
| Jun 27, 2013 at 10:13 | comment | added | user46705 | @Mari-LouA I don't think this question is really a duplicate of that one. I'm not asking about the origin of the pronouns. I'm asking about the history of a change. Neither the question nor the (only) answer to it say anything about forms like her's, your's or their's. | |
| Jun 27, 2013 at 8:26 | comment | added | user24964 | @FumbleFingers Thanks I was unaware of that. The person who told me 's was derived from his read English at Cambridge so should've known better. However they've been dead for 20 years so I can't really berate them. | |
| Jun 26, 2013 at 21:35 | review | Close votes | |||
| Jun 27, 2013 at 15:41 | |||||
| Jun 26, 2013 at 18:43 | comment | added | Cerberus - Reinstate Monica | Welcome to the site, and good question! I can't wait to hear the answer/explanation. | |
| Jun 26, 2013 at 15:49 | comment | added | FumbleFingers | @TheMathemagician: Not so. Per Wikipedia's "history" section in that previous link, The 's morpheme originated in Old English as an inflexional suffix marking genitive case. It goes on to dismiss X his Y as an erroneous "folk etymology". | |
| Jun 26, 2013 at 9:57 | comment | added | user24964 | @FumbleFingers you've inadvertantly stumbled over the origin of 's - it's a contraction of X his Y -> X's Y. | |
| Jun 26, 2013 at 0:11 | history | tweeted | twitter.com/#!/StackEnglish/status/349681237662773248 | ||
| Jun 25, 2013 at 22:41 | history | edited | tchrist♦ | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
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| Jun 25, 2013 at 22:40 | comment | added | user46705 | I've come across the "X his Y" idiom before as well. (For example a treatise called Solon His Follie. But what you're calling a "fickle typographic convention" strikes me more as a case of the language working out how to express something and becoming more standardized. | |
| Jun 25, 2013 at 22:02 | comment | added | FumbleFingers | Have a look at the "history" section in Wikipedia's page for English possessive. Particularly, note that, for example, St James's Park was sometimes written as St James his Park, back in C16. That was never "justified", but it just goes to show how fickle typographic conventions can be. | |
| Jun 25, 2013 at 21:33 | comment | added | user46705 | @FumbleFingers I didn't ask for "a detailed history of how, when and why". I'm happy to accept something as general as "that usage peaked in the late 1700s" if there's no better answer. But I still wonder if there isn't something more to be said. How about if we see whether anyone else comes up with anything before deciding that the question can't be answered? Also note The Grammar of English Grammars (circa 1850) for some disagreements among grammarians. | |
| Jun 25, 2013 at 21:26 | comment | added | FumbleFingers | @ Telemachus: As this chart shows, the "apostrophised" usage peaked in the late 1700s. But it was always illogical and inconsistent (what about his, and it's = it is, for example?). I think it was bound to fall away as more people noticed the problems, but there's no-one "in charge" of such matters - so I can't see how you could meaningfully look for a detailed history of how, when, and why the convention got quietly dropped over many decades. | |
| Jun 25, 2013 at 21:17 | comment | added | user46705 | @FumbleFingers That's a reasonable answer, as far as it goes, but who's to say that someone might not have more detailed information about when these conventions shifted so completely away from the apostrophe? That quotation is just one book, after all. | |
| Jun 25, 2013 at 21:15 | comment | added | FumbleFingers | I'm not sure there's anything more to say than was posted by this earlier answer. "Its is just as possessive as cat's, but it doesn't have an apostrophe. Why not? Because [C19] printers and grammarians never thought the matter through. Austen (or a later printer, or even hers :) was just following a relatively short-lived (and inconsistent) typography convention that was never likely to last because of the inconsistencies. | |
| Jun 25, 2013 at 21:15 | comment | added | user46705 | @FumbleFingers I added some other examples to remove the distraction over italics versus caps. (It's interesting, but not directly relevant to my real question.) | |
| Jun 25, 2013 at 21:13 | comment | added | Mari-Lou A | I never knew that capital letters were used in literature for emphasis. And we moan when people write in caps nowadays! | |
| Jun 25, 2013 at 21:13 | history | edited | user46705 | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
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| Jun 25, 2013 at 21:08 | review | First posts | |||
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| Jun 25, 2013 at 21:07 | comment | added | FumbleFingers | @Mari-LouA: It's in the public domain, so there are lots of instances in Google Books of by any information tending to that end - which are almost all reproductions of exactly this Austen sentence. Most of them use capitals, not italics. | |
| Jun 25, 2013 at 21:04 | comment | added | user46705 | @FumbleFingers I grant you that many editions would regularize the apostrophes away. I also grant, since I have no information one way or the other, that the italics may be a choice of my editor (James Kinley). However, I think it's very unlikely that this edition would have added apostrophes, so I assume that they are Austen's. In which case, my original question stands: Was that apostrophe really so "unacceptable" in her time? | |
| Jun 25, 2013 at 20:59 | comment | added | FumbleFingers | That's a peculiarity of the particular copy you happen to be reading. The vast majority of contemporary editions would modernise the typography anyway. In which context I think it's extremely likely that Austen herself used capitals to emphasise MY and HERS, rather than switching to an italic font. So your OWC edition seems to have been a bit idiosyncratic in keeping the totally unacceptable apostrophe, but unnecessarily changing the font. | |
| Jun 25, 2013 at 20:56 | history | edited | user46705 | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
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| Jun 25, 2013 at 20:50 | history | asked | user46705 | CC BY-SA 3.0 |