On 17/11/17 16:10, David Wright wrote:
On Fri 17 Nov 2017 at 07:45:58 (-0500), Kieren MacMillan wrote:
Hi all,
[Am 17.11.2017 um 08:55 schrieb Henning Hraban Ramm:]
An apostrophe in German is a sign for something left out like "so’n Ding" (short for "so ein
Ding"), similar to English use in "don’t" (do not).
It's the same in English, naturally.
It's just one of its uses, true. But the following sentence said:
«"While it would make some sense to use it in "mein’s" ("meines"), while still being unnecessary, it makes no
sense at all to use it in a genitive like "Lisa’s" except in cases like "Jens’s" (oldfashioned but complete would
be "Jensens").»¹
implying that something *has to be* omitted for an apostrophe to make
sense, but that is not true in English.
Examples, please. A suitably "grammatically correct" one, please :-)
Even the possessive "Kieren's" is derived from old English "Kierenes" (though
even most native speakers don't know that).
Of course, they don't need to know that because English accepts
's tacked onto almost anything to indicate a possessive relationship.²
Because the CORRECT possessive ending, as mentioned above, is "es".
Except it's been corrupted to " 's ". In other words, if you tack " 's "
onto the end of a word to indicate the possessive, something HAS been
omitted, namely the "e". Which is why it's wrong to use an apostrophe
with the possessive "its", because there was never an "e" there in the
first place.
Native speakers don't learn the language by studying its derivations,
but by being immersed in it. At school, they are taught "rules" that
make it easier to cope with the areas where immersion is less than
total (eg writing, formal constructions).
And said rules nearly always have their roots in genuine stuff. All too
often I agree the rules are mis-applied, especially when they state that
a modern young construct is "more correct" than the older construct that
preceded it, "Standard English" is a very young language, but I do
strongly support the use of "Standard English" and its associated rules
- one of which is that an apostrophe indicates omitted letters, usually
in the possessive, and should not be used where letters have not been
left out.
(Dialect is not Standard English, if you want to talk dialect that's
fine, just accept that it is not standard.)
Only specialists have to worry about derivations. They can't be
ignored when trying to tease out what the underlying rules of a
language really are; similarly, the mistakes made by children are
an important aspect of searching for those rules.
Anybody who cares about communicating should care about language. And if
you care about language you need to care about derivation and grammar
and all that stuff. If you don't, you get into the Humpty Dumpty world
of "words mean what I say they mean" and you can't understand what
someone else is saying - I had a perfect example of that this morning
when somebody said "close a door" when they meant "lock a door". It's
horribly frustrating when you're talking at cross purposes because you
don't know what the other person means. To bring it into computerese,
it's like people saying "computer memory" when they mean the hard disk...
Cheers,
Wol
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