BONUS: History of the possessive apostrophe | The Apostrophe | Punctuation | Khan Academy

Hello Garans and historians and linguists and friends. David here along with Jake. Hey! And Paige. Hello!

I want to continue our discussion of the history of the apostrophe in English. What I'm having Jake draw for me right now is an Old English king, because the story of the possessive apostrophe in English is really the story of Old English.

Um, like, how did we get this, like, "pages" and "Jake's"? How did we get that ending up as our possessive form in English with that apostrophe "s"? Because it didn't always used to be that way. It didn't always used to be apostrophe "s." Oh, that's very nice, Jack!

Well, I try! So that's King AEL red. So, okay, when we're talking about you know this um, the possessive, the possessive in English is very strange because it's this relic from history of these forms left over from Old English.

So here's this table, this vastly simplified table. English used to have these things called case endings um, and this is not a very—this is like a super simplified version. These are all what are called the strong case endings, that were strong and weak case endings for each gender.

In English, we had masculine, feminine, and neuter. Uh, but the important thing to remember is that the singular form of the neuter and the masculine was "es," and that just sounds like gobbledygook right now. I get it.

So let's take our King, which uh, in Old English would have been "cyning," right? Uh, and so if we're going to look at this Crown, well, in Old English, they would have just used the Latin "Corona," so we're just going to refer to this as a hat.

So if we want to talk about the king's hat in Old English, uh, we would use the special um, possessive ending—the masculine possessive ending, right? Because English had a million of these endings. There was one where if you were the subject of a sentence, you would use that ending; if you were the object of a sentence, you would use that ending.

The Norman Invasion lopped all those off along with a bunch of English heads, and now we have a much more simplified language, for better or worse.

If we're talking about uh, the kenning here, we can refer to this uh, this guy's hat as "s hit," which might not be the most accurate, but you know, Beowulf isn't around to correct me. So if we're looking at this kenning here, right, the possessive ending is this "es."

Uh, if for example we had—and I'm going to draw a queen that's not going to be as nice—Queen Brunilda. Uh, so the difference between uh, so so okay, so the Old English word for queen was perhaps unsurprisingly "cwen."

Um, and if we're going to talk about the Queen's hat, uh, we would use this singular strong feminine genitive ending which is "sequena," right, with an "E," "sequa hat," and that's where all of this started.

Okay, so we have this really ludicrously complicated system. Even this table is simplified, right? Like I've left out half of it. Um, but ultimately, what it boils down to is "suun hat" "squ hat."

Uh, and as we move through history, what happens is the French invade, and they say, "Ah, this system is very complicated. Let us get rid of it," and they do. It basically leaves us with, by the time we get to Middle English, the following:

So, by the time we get to Middle English, we have "the king is hat" and we have "the quen is hat," and what's happened is this um, Old English masculine and neuter genitive, this possessive form, has just become the norm for everything.

Everything is now masculinized, for better or worse. That's like, everything has been simplified in that direction. That's part one.

Okay, so hold that in your head. Okay, then so that's middling us, and then the printing press gets invented. Now all of a sudden, people are writing texts in English all over the place, but nobody knows how to spell yet, right?

So we've got that possessive form, and then we have what's called uh, the his possessive. So at this point, we're in Modern English, right? And so some bits of Middle English and Old English have fallen away.

Um, but so for example, um, we're still looking at something like "the king is hat," but what we're also starting to see in this one weird little period between like the late 16th and early 17th centuries, this brief fad for this thing where people went "the king his hat."

And if you can imagine like a post-Elizabethan era Londoner saying this, it kind of sounds the same to my mind: "the king is hat, the king is hat." Right?

Like, you're losing this—this "H" is kind of swallowed. So nobody knew how to spell because there was no way to spell, right?

Like, Samuel Johnson had not yet written the first dictionary. That's like 1720, I'm pretty sure. Um, there were no standards. It's not because people were dumb or anything, certainly not.

It’s just that these standards didn't exist. Like, in the great scheme of history, there's stuff that we do now, you know, that 400 years from now people are going to look back at us and be like, "You used words to communicate?"

You know, like, we have no idea. So what starts to happen is this thing, this "the king his hat" becomes more and more common, um, to the point where people just sort of understand it as a given and it starts to get collapsed to save space.

So "the king his hat" becomes "the king's hat," like so, and it’s just—this one weird fad usage, which you could even argue is like a folk etymology or something made up, it doesn't matter it happened; it’s attested in print, and this is how it was collapsed.

Um, and what happened as a result of this usage is the same thing happened to this, so "the king's hat" became "the king's hat." And it was just as well, frankly, because if you were talking about the Queen's hat in this his possessive context, it just—you'd either have to do "the queen her hat," which is fine I suppose, or "the queen his hat," which doesn’t make a ton of sense.

And if you're wondering how there can be just this random change in sound in a language without anybody orchestrating it, think of a time where you say something like, "I'm GNA go to the store."

I'm gonna—what do you really saying there? It's a contraction of "I am going to," but nobody actually says "I am going to go" right now. They say "I'm going to go."

So words are always kind of mashing into each other. If you remember from an earlier video when Paige and I were discussing the principle of least effort, that's what Jake is getting at: is the tongue is lazy. Don't feel bad, but the tongue is lazy.

Yeah, so what happened was you know this thing became—and pretty soon everything became this way. Uh, so because of this one strange little fad, what we call the Saxon possessive, this thing "the Kingus" "the quis" eventually just became "kings and queens," like so.

How elegant! Thank you, Jake. Paige, does this square with how—I mean, this is how apostrophes are used in English, but Jake and Paige, y’all were telling me about all the many ways that apostrophes are used in other languages around the world, right?

Well, I think, you know, punctuation marks are tools, just like any other tools that human beings use. They can be used different ways in different languages.

So in Dutch, um, apostrophes are used to make plurals for words that end in a vowel. So, okay, "photo" in Dutch is "f o t o," and if you want to have multiple photos, well, you have to throw in an apostrophe. You have to throw in an apostrophe before the "S."

No good reason why that's the case; that's just how they do it. Uh, conversely, Dutch does not put an apostrophe for possession. So if you wanted to say "Jan's book," you would just say "Jan's."

Oh, so it kind of retains this genitive—it can—it contains this possessive form, right? Same thing with German. So how do we say—how do we say "Jan's book"?

"Jan's book" like that? Mhm. Okay, uh, same thing with German. German is a little bit more conservative in that it retains the "es." So "das Buch" might mean the book in German, and if you want to say "of the book" or if you want to say "the books," you'd say "des Buches," with that "e s" ending tagged onto "Buch."

Oh, the same one as in Old English, right? So since English is kind of a cousin language to German, you can see which way the ball fell on these two languages.

Wow, that's super cool! Paige, any insights from Danish?

Yeah, so from my limited, you know, expertise in Danish, uh, people who speak Danish tend to abbreviate like all their words. Like everything gets shortened all the time, sure.

Uh, so the apostrophe is sometimes used in a similar way to how it is here to sort of show what's being shortened.

Okay, so in Danish to say something like "take me with you," you would say "Tag mig med," so then you can shorten that first word in writing by getting rid of the "g" and adding an apostrophe.

Okay, this actually doesn't happen much; it kind of has limited use. But it's similar to how we use it for contractions in English. And like how this possessive was formed, it's interesting that the possessive, the modern possessive in English is just a form of contraction.

Yeah, it's bizarre. Well folks, thank you so much for joining me on this journey through the wacky history of the apostrophe in English. Thanks for taking us!

Yeah, it was fun! Anytime. And remember folks, you can learn anything! David out! Paige out! Jake out!