Posted by Mark Dudley on September 28, 2006 at 23:04:06 from 82.18.237.26 user Whiteshill.
In Reply to: Re: "Ds" - Re: Filling in the gaps posted by Jock on September 28, 2006 at 20:02:26:
While not a linguistic expert I do not believe this statement from the Wikipedia article to be self-evident:
"The 18th century explanation that the apostrophe might replace a genitive pronoun, as in "the king's horse" being a shortened form of "the king, his horse", is erroneous (a construction which actually occurs in German dialects and has replaced the genitive there, together with the "of" construction that also exists in English). Indeed, it would be expected that plurals and feminine nouns would form possessives using '-r': "*The queen'r children" would be short for "the queen, her children". Since this is different from the plural, it would provide a useful distinction. The fact that that is not how English speakers form possessives shows that the above explanation is incorrect"
Wikipedia is not an authoritive source in my (humble!) opinion.