Purely, utterly, and quintessentially English?

[jaunthie]

The English language is quite unique. It's extremely adaptive and prone to borrowing words and rules from other languages. It's a hodge-podge, really, which is one of the reasons why it's so (relatively) easy to learn to speak so that you can be understood, but so difficult to learn to speak properly, without occasional betraying errors in grammar and sentence structure.

But you know what else is unique to English? Something that I never realized until the other day, when talking with my Aunt K and MamaBear and fisherbear?

The possessive apostrophe s. As in, "Jaunthie's" or "fisherbear's" or "the cat's." I can't think of a single other language that uses the possessive apostrophe s construction. Certainly not French, or Spanish, or Italian or Latin either, what little I know of those. And I don't think we picked it up from the German side of things, either. Moreover, my extremely linguistically educated (and word-geek) mother-in-law and husband couldn't think of another language that uses the possessive apostrophe s, either.

And for some reason, despite all the other English-isms and American-isms that have crept into the world, I don't think the possessive apostrophe s is one of them. Which seems weird to me, because it's so very convenient. But there it is.

The possessive apostrophe s. A purely English construction. Go figure.

Comments

[tylik.livejournal.com]

Structurally, though, it's almost identical to the Chinese partical "de" (and drat it, the Chinese IME isn't working - first time I tried it after an upgrade, so I guess not shocking... but I'd give you the character, otherwise.)

[fisherbear.livejournal.com]

I seem to recall that the Japanese "no" is rather like "de" as well. It's been awhile though.

As far as "'s" goes... I think it depends on how specific you get. As an orthographic infix that marks the elision of an archaic suffix that was indicative of possession, it's probably unique. As an orthographic marker of possession, not so much.