Question about apostrophes

[chairdriver]

Please can you simplify/summarise your post for my understanding.

 

Basically he is saying:

 

If a language is inflected, to get the meaning from a sentence, you have to look at the endings of words, like in Latin. The thing doing the doing has to be in the nominative and the doee has to be in the accusative, etc etc, with the appropriate endings.

 

English is a hybrid language, where some of our words are inflected, but most aren't. We still retain certain accusatives (whom, him, them - ending in m because the Latin accusative most often ends in m).

 

Supergrunch is saying, that in old English there was a genitive case (genitive is the case to demonstrate ownership. In Latin, the genitive of puella is puellae, meaning "of the girl"), the ending used being -es. Over time this shortened to -'s.

 

However, in the case of its; it is a pronoun and in English pronouns are inflected, and like he and she, you add an s to make the genitive (well almost - his and hers are somewhat like just adding an s).

 

The apostrophe in it's is used to denote an ellision between two words (like would have becomes would've).

 

Hope that's clear.

[MoogleViper]

Basically he is saying:

 

If a language is inflected, to get the meaning from a sentence, you have to look at the endings of words, like in Latin. The thing doing the doing has to be in the nominative and the doee has to be in the accusative, etc etc, with the appropriate endings.

 

English is a hybrid language, where some of our words are inflected, but most aren't. We still retain certain accusatives (whom, him, them - ending in m because the Latin accusative most often ends in m).

 

Supergrunch is saying, that in old English there was a genitive case (genitive is the case to demonstrate ownership. In Latin, the genitive of puella is puellae, meaning "of the girl"), the ending used being -es. Over time this shortened to -'s.

 

However, in the case of its; it is a pronoun and in English pronouns are inflected, and like he and she, you add an s to make the genitive (well almost - his and hers are somewhat like just adding an s).

 

The apostrophe in it's is used to denote an ellision between two words (like would have becomes would've).

 

Hope that's clear.

 

I sort of get what you are saying, but (and unless I'm missing something) it doesn't explain why that is.

[chairdriver]

I sort of get what you are saying, but (and unless I'm missing something) it doesn't explain why that is.

 

Why what is?

 

Why its is the genitive form of it?

[MoogleViper]

Why what is?

 

Why its is the genitive form of it?

 

Yeah. Why was it not "ites" in old English. ( I think I understood correctly that if something belonged to me it would be Sames?)

[chairdriver]

Yeah. Why was it not "ites" in old English. ( I think I understood correctly that if something belonged to me it would be Sames?)

 

I'm not actually sure about the old English thing; I was just quoting SG. Old English is Gothic, and I don't really know any German, so I can't really comment.

 

In Latin, "eius" is the genitive of the demonstrative pronoun, and can mean his, hers or its. It's plausible that the genitives of our pronouns are derived from this (maybe somewhat indirectly though).

[Razz]

I don't know why, but for some reason I find english grammar fascinating.

[Supergrunch]

I do. Hence why I created the thread.

 

 

 

I thought this post might make more sense if I looked up the definition of inflection.

 

inflection; prosody: the patterns of stress and intonation in a language

 

prosody; term used to refer to speech elements such as intonation, pitch, rate, loudness, rhythm, etc.

 

intonation; The ways in which the voice pitch rises and falls in speech.

 

Please can you simplify/summarise your post for my understanding.

 

 

 

I've never even seen anybody do that.

I'm talking about this meaning of the word inflection, overt inflection in particular.

One of my uni tutors discussed this with us recently. Basically that 'It' does not recieve an apostrophe for the possessive. She had no idea why, and told us she thought it was one of the stupidest things in the language And that was from a University English professor.

This whole apostrophe thing is one of those things that no-one seems to be able to trace back to. My tutors at Uni had a good go but I can't remember what they said now.

 

And here's me with an Honours Degree in English and even I can't explain it. For Shame:wtf:

Well, it's more of a linguistics topic, so I suppose English teachers of any kind are less likely to know.

It's probably similar to "His". Hi's sounds like it's someone called "Hi", His' (His-is) sounds stupid and awkward and so it's "His".

 

Hers and it's probably follow the same pattern so they're all similar, even if the sounds are exactly the same as "Her's" and "It's".

No, words such as "his", "its" and "ours" (possessive determiners) are far older than the possessive use of the apostrophe. (which, as I said, derives from the genitive case)

Basically he is saying:

 

If a language is inflected, to get the meaning from a sentence, you have to look at the endings of words, like in Latin. The thing doing the doing has to be in the nominative and the doee has to be in the accusative, etc etc, with the appropriate endings.

 

English is a hybrid language, where some of our words are inflected, but most aren't. We still retain certain accusatives (whom, him, them - ending in m because the Latin accusative most often ends in m).

 

Supergrunch is saying, that in old English there was a genitive case (genitive is the case to demonstrate ownership. In Latin, the genitive of puella is puellae, meaning "of the girl"), the ending used being -es. Over time this shortened to -'s.

 

However, in the case of its; it is a pronoun and in English pronouns are inflected, and like he and she, you add an s to make the genitive (well almost - his and hers are somewhat like just adding an s).

 

The apostrophe in it's is used to denote an ellision between two words (like would have becomes would've).

 

Hope that's clear.

Pretty much, but it's old English rather than Latin that had the "-es" ending; most Latinate words weren't introduced into English until around 1100, when the language changed to middle English. And "hybrid language" is a bit of a misnomer - all languages have some inflection, it's just that old English has a lot more than modern English.

Yeah. Why was it not "ites" in old English. ( I think I understood correctly that if something belonged to me it would be Sames?)

Right, let's look at old English first:

 

It was a highly inflected language, so words tended to overtly inflect to indicate things such as case. Among the inflecting words were possessive determiners. There was also a genitive case, which often involved words ending in "-es".

 

Now, how does modern English differ?

 

It's not nearly as inflected. Most words no longer overtly inflect, but a few still do, such as possessive determiners. The possessive determiners used are "his", "its" and the like. Note there are still no apostrophes used; nothing is being omitted.

 

However, the genitive case no longer really exists, and the "-es" ending has changed to "-'s", with the apostrophe marking removal of the e. Hence "dog's bowl" indicates a bowl belongs to the dog in question. But what do we do if there are multiple dogs that own the bowl? Well, "dogs's bowl" is a bit clumsy, so people settled on "dogs' bowl", simply because it's neater. This is the only apostrophe usage in such pronouns that doesn't really indicate any omitted letters. (though you could argue "-es" is omitted from the end of the word)

 

In addition, apostrophes are now used to indicate shortenings such as "hasn't" for "has not", and this usage extends to "it's" for "it is". This is completely unrelated to the possessive determiner "its", and the apostrophe is not used to indicate possession - why do that, when we already have the "its" possessive determiner?

 

So "ites" is a bit meaningless. Firstly, words have changed a lot since old English, so "it" wouldn't be the same. Secondly, there is no need to use the genitive case, as we can simply use the possessive determiner. The genitive case marks nouns, not determiners.

 

I'm not actually sure about the old English thing; I was just quoting SG. Old English is Gothic, and I don't really know any German, so I can't really comment.

 

In Latin, "eius" is the genitive of the demonstrative pronoun, and can mean his, hers or its. It's plausible that the genitives of our pronouns are derived from this (maybe somewhat indirectly though).

As I said, the Latin influence was relatively small until 1100, so I think that's not that likely. There was still some influence, what with the Saxons originating from Europe, and the widespread use of ecclesiastical Latin, but I doubt this would be great enough to have much effect on old English cases - more likely is the introduction of a few Latinate words.

I don't know why, but for some reason I find english grammar fascinating.

I love all grammar.