Posted Oct 16, 2002 by Kes
It's been suggested that the original form of a possessive statement was something like this: 'The dog his bone.' Contraction of the middle two words results in 'The dog's bone.'
Of course, this fails to account for the equivalent feminine or plural forms ... but who's perfect? 
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Posted Oct 16, 2002 by Gnomon
No. Originally, English was an inflected language, which meant that words had different endings for different cases. Belonging to the dog was given by dogges. More than one dog was given by doggen and so on. Dog's is short for dogges. The e has been left out so you put in an apostrophe. This applies to feminine words too.
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Posted Oct 16, 2002 by Kes
Aha! Doggone it!  . Thanks. 
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