What's the meaning of this sentence?
From the book "A History of the Cries of London", page 101:
Have you observ’d the wench in the street, She’s scarce any hose or shoes to her feet; And when she cries, she sings, ‘I have hot Codlings, hot Codlings.’
Compensating for contraction, ellipsis ("The omission of a grammatically required word or phrase that can be inferred"), and substituting equivalent terms, etc. gives us the following sequence:
• She’s scarce any hose or shoes to her feet
• She has scarce any hose or shoes to her feet
• She has scarcely any hose or shoes for (or on) her feet
• She has almost no stockings or shoes for her feet
Stockings and hose or hosiery differ, hose implying longer garments covering much more of the legs than stockings. I think the original sentence might refer either to tattered and worn hose and shoes, or tattered hose and missing shoes. In either case, use of unkempt ("dishevelled; untidy; dirty; not kept up") here is possible, but note that dirty is not implied by scarce any.
It's just a variation of the 'so poor we went to school barefoot' phrase. Hose is an archaic term for stockings (possibly the origin of pantyhose -but being neither female nor American, I can't confirm that), and a street vendor might well be so poor as to have only the remnants of shoes and stockings.
She’s scarce any is a contraction of she has scarcely any. I.e, she does not have much/many.
Scarce(ly) is a Negative trigger for the NPI any. And negative adjectives or adverbs scarcely ever are completely regular, whence the lack of -ly.
Finally, the -'s contraction can represent either is or has, though the latter is rare these days, and downright ungrammatical in the 'possess' sense of have. But this isn't Modern English.
