#voxxal

friend’s = friends buddy’s = buddys duck’s = ducks

apostrophes in english are used to denote the absence of a letter, right? well what is that apostrophe replacing? the answer is a vowel. the old germanic genitive (case of a noun marking a possessive) ending was -es or something like that. over time the vowel was lost, and “friendes” became “friend’s”, more or less. but uh.. then why don’t we mark all other instances of a deleted sound over time with an apostrophe? cause then we’d get shit like “ fre’ond’ ” or whatever. and while we’re marking historical spellings why don’t we just write the word “fish” like “*pisḱos”? idk but the loss of the vowel in “-es” is a regular, standard sound change, and i for one will strive to never use the ‘s if i can avoid it. 

you may say “but then it looks like the plural!”, to which i say “so?” It already sounds like the plural and we’re able to distinguish it just fine, what should it matter? besides, in latin the word for fish was “piscis”, and the way to say “of the fish” was also “piscis”. in latin, the nominative and genitive were pronounced the same in words ending in -is, and that’s even the SINGULAR fish! a word like “amica”, ‘friend’, has the same problem that english has. friend’s = amicae, friends = amicae, but friends’s = amicarum. the same sound coincidence occurs in latin, and they had no problem distinguishing the two. plus, from context, it would almost never contrast. 

my friends are here

my friends dog is great

I was looking up lyrics from O Father O Satan O Sun by Behemoth, a real hot summer jam sure to liven up any get together. But anyway, so I was looking up the lyrics and it does the cardinal sin of “cool sounding old-tymey english”. 

“THOU THAT FLOWEST, THOU THAT GOEST!”

nu-uh. nope. You go = Thou goest. this is true. but Thou that goest =/= You that go. the “that” makes it 3rd person, and thus, -eth, not -est. This is seen in languages like German. 

I speak = Ich spreche = I speak

You speak = Du sprichst = Thou speakst

He speaks = Er spricht = He speaketh.