The Origins of the Apostrophe
Where This Most Contentious Piece of Punctuation Came From
Argued over and insisted upon, the apostrophe is one of the favourite issues of grammar pedants. But they may not be as correct as they think...
The apostrophe is surely the most contentious of all pieces of punctuation. Its absence can raise tuts of disapproval, and a misplaced apostrophe can provoke sheer outrage from those who insist on correct punctuation as a cornerstone of civilisation. And judging from the sales of Lynne Truss’ book Eats Shoots and Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation, there are more such people than one might think.
Use of the Apostrophe
The basic uses of the apostrophe are pretty widely known: to mark missing letters in a contraction (“can’t”, “shouldn’t”) or to form a possessive (“Paul’s”, “Lucia’s”.) More of a mystery is the question of where this practice came from. Why, in order to show that one noun belongs to another noun, do we add a splot of ink and an “s”? No other language springs to mind with a similar practice.
Origins of the Apostrophe
The answer lies back in the eighteenth century, when English grammar and English vocabulary were being codified for the first time. At the same time as the famous lexicographer Dr. Samuel Johnson was compiling his dictionary, the rules and principles of English grammar were formalised, and they look similar today. It was around this time that the rules about not splitting infinitives and not putting conjunctions at the end of a sentence were invented (though that’s another story...)
Contractions
When our grammar was being formalised, the possessive simply had an “S” on the end: “Chaucers book”, “the dogs bone.” An apostrophe was added because grammarians assumed that a contraction had taken place, that “Chaucers book” was a contraction of “Chaucer his book.” This might seem fairly odd, but the use of “his” to make a rather lumbering possessive was an established part of English usage – eg, “Sir Philip Sidney His Arcadia.” Even as late as the nineteenth century a character in Tom Brown’s Schooldays signs a piece of paper with the words “Harry East his mark.”
Anglo-Saxon Inflections
In fact this addition of an apostrophe was based on a false assumption. The possessive “s” was not a shortened version of the word “his”, but an inflection left over from Anglo-Saxon. Like those in Latin, Anglo-Saxon words altered their endings depending on how they were being used, and the genitive case (the possessive) stuck an “s” on the end. (This also incidentally explains why “mary her book” and “the parliament their opinion” came to be expressed with an apostrophe and an “s”, despite the word “his” not appearing in either phrase.)
Even though they were wrong, the eighteenth century grammarians were so influential that to this day we still use an apostrophe to denote the possessive. It’s funny to think that one of the points most obsessively insisted on by those who demand correct grammar is itself a complete howler. and solecism.
