BONUS: History of the apostrophe

hello grammarians historians and linguists David here with Paige hi AM Jake hey and we're gonna talk about the history of the apostrophe and the apostrophe isn't just a punctuation mark in fact the word apostrophe comes from comes to us from Greek from two different compounds up Oh meaning away and strophe meaning to turn so it's a turning of stuffing we need to turn away so it's a turning away and and in rhetoric in classical rhetoric when we talk about apostrophe it's turning away from your actual audience to deliver a message to absent people or inanimate objects or just non personified you're trying to personify and in human concept so before it was a punctuation mark it was a literary technique it was a turn it was a figure of speech you know so if you think about examples from literature this can be the two things that my mind immediately leaps to being me are oh happy dagger the speech from the end of Romeo and Juliet nack5 boom sorry y'all didn't see I plunged the stylist into my breasts oh happy dagger this is thy sheath there rust and let me die boom so like in that like you know we're addressing the dagger the dagger is not alive it is a knife it cannot respond or on a lighter note perhaps from HMS Penta for there's there's a song fair moon to the icing right regent of the heavens it's the moon the moon can't talk back and from this figure of speech this is where we get the idea that an apostrophe represents something that is missing that's how we come to get its main use to represent that something that it's standing in for absent letters just like an apostrophe in rhetoric would be delivered taps and friends follow me over to the next screen let's do a little bit of history so the apostrophe was introduced to the french-language by an engraver and humanist name is Jeff white Hawley I think is how you would say his name that's a guess in around the late 16th century things around the 1580s Tory is the man who also introduced a lot of diacritic or accent marks into French so you know instead of like ma meaning loved it would be a me like that and he's the person that used it originally in French to start representing eliminated letters so if you have an expression like la no meaning the our Tory would have it no like that you know and this apostrophe and there boom represents this missing vowel sound so okay so it's around this time that this apostrophe starts making its way into English because remember England has been under French rule for centuries at this point the French invaded in the 11th century we're talking about the Norman conquest of 1066 and since then French culture has had a very profound impact on the island of Great Britain you know so everyone in a position of power speaks French or understands and reads French so the nobility speaks and reads French anyone that's literate speaks and reads French and so you're gonna be you know this intelligencia is going to be coming into contact with a lot of French see the apostrophe being used this way and say oh that's awfully convenient and so it's around this time around the like early 17th century late 16th century that we're starting to see this apostrophe usage in English this is around the time when you first see the contraction of I am I'm show up is around this period Jake does this square with how apostrophes are used in other languages too yeah it's the same in pretty much all the romance languages so anything derived from Latin you have in Latin these long definite articles like la I ll e or ela I ll a and all the definite articles that come out of this and all the romance languages take some fraction of the original from Latin and omit some part with an apostrophe so on me amico and Italian to make that to add a definite article to make it the friend you can add just L apostrophe lamech oh cool so yeah so during this time of apostrophe expansion across the continent people just go nuts right like there's no standardization of usage for apostrophes people are using it every which way but loose you know so they're using it like this - using it for contractions they're using it for multiples of stuff like stuff that we would consider incorrect today like books like that whoa that looks terrible to me and crucially they're using it for the possessive so like Jake's and the history of that usage is another story entirely but this for now is the history of the introduction of the apostrophe into English you can learn anything David and company out