My understanding of the origin of apostrophe-s is that the greatly inflected noun of Old English lost nearly all of its inflection in Middle English.  The varied markers for the possessive case were leveld to an -es, which would have been pronounced as a complete syllable, but becoming just an [s] or [z] with more time.  The apostrophe may have appeared when conservative scribes felt it necessary to mark the ommision of the e.  Or possibly writers believing the folk etymology that the possessive -s is short for his, started marking this with an apostrophe.  I was unable to find this in my books, so the uncertainty arrises from my recall of my History of the English Language class.  However, OE did not mark possessives by his .  Old English was a synthetic language, while Modern English is analytic.  Number and case etc. were all marked by a comlicated set of suffixes which had no independant meaning apart from their attachment to the root word. Craig

Now this is an etymological question. Where does the apostrophe in   constructions like this one come from: This is Peter's car. Could it be that formerly people said: This is Peter his car. ??? I doubt it.  English is a Germanic language; the poster Peter Hein appears to be in Germany.   Peter's car is called a possessive in English, which would be represented by the Genitive case in German.  Peter:  isn't the Genitive case often indicated by an s ending on the noun?  I think that's where Peters came from:  the German Genitive ending. Why the apostrophe?  Probably to distinguish Peter's from the plural Peters .  The s plural is nearly universal in English, whereas it is only one way of making a plural in German.  We have some English words left that reflect the German en plural, such as children and oxen , but not too many of them. In addition, there is a general tendency in English to separate things which are run together in German.  In German, noun phrases are pushed together into single nouns, such as kuchenuhr , while in English, the nouns of the phrase are kept apart, kitchen clock , although in pronunciation, the phrase is stressed as a single word, as if it were kitchenclock . Similarly, English has verbs that are equivalent to German verbs with separable prefix, but in English, the prefix has separated permanently:               German                     English        

Geoff Butler < This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it writes: : This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it Peter Hein writes: : : Now this is an etymological question. Where does the apostrophe in : constructions like this one come from: This is Peter's car. : : Could it be that formerly people said: This is Peter his car. ??? : : No, they said This is Peteres car . This required great foresight, : since the car was several centuries in the future when they said it. You're right on your first assertion, but no plaustral plaudits for your second.  The Gaulish word for carts and chariots gained currency (which is also a related word) in Latin at some point as the word _carrus_. The centuries-later contrivance that has now driven out almost all other meanings (though railway car retains the original sense of simply a wheeled vehicle).  Some wag has remarked that the word automobile is a horrid miscegenation of Greek and Latin, and that we'd be better served calling it either an autokinetikon or an ipsemobile . ..................................................................... World's first strip joint: the topless towers of Ilium Matthew Rabuzzi

: No, they said This is Peteres car . This required great foresight, : since the car was several centuries in the future when they said it. You're right on your first assertion, but no plaustral plaudits for your second.... <strawclutchAh, but the *intended* meaning in the </ah forget it. Yep, conceded. Geoff Butler

Thus it seems consistent of English, [...] Well, I would have thought consistent was one accusation you could NEVER level at English roy