I just found out why we English speakers use apostrophe-ess ( ‘s ) to indicate the Saxon Genitive Case [1]. “Huh?” I can hear you gasp. I’ve been using it for 40 years to indicate the possessions of an object by a subject. It just always was this way, like mountains or the alt-tab keyboard convention. But never did it occur to me to wonder why we write it this particular way.
Until today. I was reading some essays by a mollusk biologist [2], and he threw this tidbit in as an aside (with the supporting evidence): Up until well into the 17th century, an Englishman would have to say (for example), “Yoda, his force is strong.” By the 18th century, they were saying, “Yoda’s force is strong.”
See?
We acknowledge the inherent sexism of the language whenever we say, “Sally’s cookies” rather than “Sally’r cookies”. But that’s beside the point: The point is “his”.
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