Re: YAEGT: 's (was Re: Standard Average European (was: case system))

On 14/04/08 05:46:54, Jörg Rhiemeier wrote:
>
> Hallo!
>
> On Sun, 13 Apr 2008 13:49:28 -0500, Eric Christopherson wrote:
>
...
> > like "the king his castle". I'm not sure how they treated inanimate
>
> > possessors.
>
> _the house its door_?  But the _'s_ genitive is avoided with
> inanimate possessors generally.
In fact, if my recollection is correct, "its" is a fairly modern
possessive pronoun/adjective. Earlier, the word was "his". Hence, "the
house his front door" would've been grammatically correct from a
perspective of gender, if "the man his house" was and even if "the
women his house" wasn't.

And I must agree with Mark, that I don't think there's anything
particularly wrong with using 's and inanimate possessors---although I
have heard this before. You might, however, get away with the reverse
statement: that 's is preferred over "of" for animate possessors, but
there is no preference for inanimate possessors. (That strikes me as
intuitively true, but I haven't tried to work out if it stands up
against the evidence.)

> > In any event, that analysis of <'s> didn't last.
>
> Actually, a contraction of "his", later generalized to the
> feminine, seems a more likely origin of _'s_ to me than the
> Old English (< PIE) genitive suffix _-s_.  Modern English _'s_
> is a clitic attaching to the last element of the genitive NP
> (see _the King of England's castle_) rather than a true suffix;
> and clitics usually form from words and not from suffixes.
That is an interesting point, but doesn't explain why the masculine and
feminine are the same.

--
Tristan.