RE: [Leica] Mike Johnston: Great Linguistic Scholar

["Kotsinadelis, Peter (Peter)" <peterk@lucent.com>]

Did the Tudors use Leicas?

- -----Original Message-----
From: Marc James Small [mailto:msmall@roanoke.infi.net]
Sent: Saturday, November 06, 1999 12:41 PM
To: leica-users@mejac.palo-alto.ca.us
Subject: [Leica] Mike Johnston: Great Linguistic Scholar


At 02:06 PM 11/6/1999 +0000, Mike Johnston wrote:
>
>What they don't realize is that the apostrophe replaces missing letters
>in these cases, too. Originally, possession was indicated by the word
>"his." Thus, to say that an axe belonged to John, in Middle English one
>would write "John, his axe." 

This is absolute nonsense.  In Old and Middle English, possession is
indicated by the ending "-es", so that "Marc's book" would have been
"Marces bucu" or somesuch.  In the Early Modern period, during the Tudor
reigns, one of the sound changes which afflicted British English (not all
of these changes ran north of the border in Scotland) was to slur over the
full inflected ending, so that "Marces" (pronounced 'Marc-ehs" became
pronounced "Marx".  The result was the spelling convention we have today of
spelling this "Marc's", the apostrophe indicating the missing "-e-".

Citations available to those who are interested.  I'd suggest starting with
Quirk & Wrenn, probably.

Marc

msmall@roanoke.infi.net  FAX:  +540/343-7315
Cha robh bas fir gun ghras fir!