The his genitive is a means of forming a genitive construction by linking two nouns with a possessive pronoun such as "his" (e.g. "my friend his car" instead of "my friend's car"). This construction enjoyed only a brief heyday in English in the late 16th century and the 17th century, but is common in some varieties of a number of Germanic languages, and standard in Afrikaans.
In Early Modern English, the orthographic practice developed of marking the genitive case by inserting the word "his" between the possessor noun, especially where it ended in -s, and the following possessed noun. The heyday of this construction, employed by John Lyly, Euphues His England (1580), the poem Willobie His Avisa (1594), in the travel accounts under the title Purchas His Pilgrimes (1602), Ben Jonson's Sejanus His Fall (1603) or John Donne's Ignatius His Conclave (1611), was the late 16th and early 17th century. [1] For example, in 1622, the Holy Roman Emperor's ambassador in London "ran at tilt in the Prince his company with Lord Montjoy". [2] The term "his genitive" may refer either to marking genitives with "his" as a reflexive or intensifying marker or, much more precisely, the practice of using "his" instead of an -s. Therefore, use of the "his" genitive in writing occurred throughout later Middle English and early modern English as an intensifier, but as a replacement marker only for a brief time.
In Old English, the genitive case was marked most often by an "-es" ending for masculine and neuter nouns, although it was marked with other suffixes or by umlaut with many nouns. There are no unassailable examples of the "his" genitive in Anglo-Saxon. Although a small number of examples were produced by earlier scholars to show that the "his" genitive can be traced back to Old English, Allen examines every putative example of the "his" genitive that has been presented from Old English and finds them all to be subject to other possible analyses. The first clear examples of the "his" genitive do not appear until c. 1250, when the -s ending had extended to all noun classes and NP-internal agreement had disappeared, making the -s ending the sole marker of genitive case. [3]
The history of the "his" genitives in English is extensively covered in Allen (2008). [4] There were two periods of "his" genitives. In the earliest period, only "his" (or some h-less form such as ys, is, or us) is found, even when the possessor was feminine, as in Margere ys dowghter ys past to Godd 'Margery's daughter has passed to God' (Cely letter from 1482) or plural, as in ...not borrowed of other men his lippes 'not borrowed from other men's lips' (Roger Asham, b. 1515). In 1546, however, we find Elizabeth Holland her howse 'Elizabeth Holland's house', and after this, the pronoun always agrees with a feminine or plural head. [4] However, most examples involve singular masculine possessors and are therefore not diagnostic for agreement or the lack of it. Most examples in fact involve men's names.
Around 1680, the "his" genitive began to disappear, in contrast to the "-s" genitive. [5] Before that period, both "his" and -s genitives occur in the writings of the same author, although the -s genitive is always dominant, except with men's names. Essentially, this meant writing, or saying, "Ned his house" instead of "Neds house." As Curme puts it, "The s-genitive was doubtless felt by many as a contraction of the his-genitive, which strengthened the tendency to place an apostrophe before the genitive endings" (as an indication of an elided "his"). [5] The "his" genitive was not limited to masculine singular nouns in Middle English, but it is also found with feminine gender and plural number. It is only in the mid-sixteenth century, in Early Modern English that we find "agreeing" genitives like "Pallas her Glasse" from Sir Arthur Gorges's English translation of Francis Bacon's The Wisedome of the Ancients from the original Latin. [6] These "agreeing" genitives were likely analogous. Furthermore, impersonal and lifeless, though linguistically masculine, nouns were rarely expressed with the "his" genitive.
An "agreeing" pronominal genitive is also present in other Germanic languages, while it died out quickly in English. Therefore, although there are analogous "his" genitives in Low German and other languages, no Old English "his" genitive is the source of the early Modern English form. It is possible that the "his" genitive derived instead from unstressed forms of the Middle English "-es" genitive, as, according to Baugh, "the -es of the genitive, being unaccented, was frequently written and pronounced -is, -ys". [7] In other words, it was pronounced as "his" already, and "his" often lost its /h/ when unstressed in speech. Therefore, it is likely that people were already saying "his" after a masculine noun in later Middle English by hypercorrection, and the "his" genitive may therefore have been an orthographic anomaly. Samuel Johnson, among others, recognized that the apostrophe possessive was not due to the contraction of "his". [7]
The "his" genitive as a hypercorrection had a brief literary existence, whatever its prevalence in spoken English. Having only appeared around 1580, it was exceptionally rare by 1700. As printing became more widespread, and printed grammars informally standardized written English, the "-s" genitive (also known as the Saxon genitive) with an apostrophe (as if a "his" had been contracted) had gone to all nominal genders, including nouns that previously had an unmarked genitive (such as "Lady" in "Lady Day"). [5] This remains the general form for creating possessives in English.
Constructions parallel to the "his" genitive are found in other languages, especially Germanic.
An important difference between the early "his" genitives in Middle English and the other Germanic languages is that the early English "his" genitives agreed with neither the possessor nor the possessed thing; the possessive marker was always some form of "his" or "ys". In Early Modern English, however, the genitive marker was clearly a pronoun that agreed with the possessor.
"His" genitive constructions also occur in languages such as the Turkic family (including Turkish and Azerbaijani), Hungarian, and Indonesian; [18] unlike in Germanic languages, they are marked by possessive affixes instead of separate pronouns.
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