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Transcript Episode 97: OooOooh~~ our possession episode oOooOOoohh 👻

This is a transcript for Lingthusiasm episode ‘OooOooh~~ our possession episode oOooOOoohh 👻'. It’s been lightly edited for readability. Listen to the episode here or wherever you get your podcasts. Links to studies mentioned and further reading can be found on the episode show notes page.

[Music]

Lauren: Welcome to Lingthusiasm, a podcast that’s enthusiastic about linguistics! I’m Lauren Gawne.

Gretchen: I’m Gretchen McCulloch. Today, we’re getting enthusiastic about possession – using things like “have” and “of” and “apostrophe S” and how different languages do possession differently. But first, next month is our 8th anniversary! We’ve been making Lingthusiasm for eight years with you, and we’re still excited to keep making it.

Lauren: As part of the anniversary celebrations, we’re running the final listener survey in our trilogy of surveys. We have a new set of linguistics experiments for you to do, and we use these surveys to shape topics and ideas for the show.

Gretchen: As one example, we had a really good response to our linguistics advice bonus episode that we did last year, so you can also use this year’s survey to ask us your pressing linguistics advice questions for a potential future advice episode. You can suggest linguistically interesting books for us to read and maybe comment on. We have further refinements on the bouba-kiki experiment, and more!

Lauren: You can hear about the results of the last two years of surveys in bonus episodes that we’ll link to in the show notes. We’ll be sharing the results of the next experiments next year.

Gretchen: We have had ethics board approval from La Trobe University, which is Lauren’s university, for this survey, so we can use the results in linguistics research papers as well. But the ethics board is only for three years, so this is your last chance to be a part of the Lingthusiasm listener survey.

Lauren: If you did the survey in a previous year, first of all, thank you! And secondly, yes, you are still allowed to take it again if you want. There’re new questions.

Gretchen: To do the survey or to read more details about it, go to bit.ly/lingthusiasmsurvey24 – that’s all one word, no spaces, no capitals or anything.

Lauren: Or you can follow the links from our website and social media.

Gretchen: Our most recent bonus episode was all about communicating with aliens. We discussed how alien languages might work, how we might try and make sense of them based on how existing human and animal communication systems work, and how we would plan to pack enough batteries for xenolinguistic fieldwork.

Lauren: Go to patreon.com/lingthusiasm to get access to the xenolinguistics episode – and way more bonus episodes – and to help keep the show running ad-free.

[Music]

Lauren: On today’s episode, we’ll be discussing –

Gretchen: Ooh, can I say it in my witch voice?

Lauren: Yes, you can say this in your witch voice.

Gretchen: [Witch voice] “Eye of newt and toe of frog, / Wool of bat and tongue of dog, / Adder’s fork and blind-worm’s sting, / Lizard’s leg and owlet’s wing, / For a charm of powerful trouble, / Like a hell-broth boil and bubble.”

Lauren: [Laughs] Those lines come from Shakespeare’s play Macbeth, particularly the witches who feature in Macbeth. And not only is it scene-settingly spooky, but it is doing something important grammatically for this episode.

Gretchen: So, “eye of newt and lizard’s leg” are both – one of these constructions has an “of” in it, “eye OF newt,” and the other one has the “apostrophe S,” “LIZARD’S leg.” These are two constructions that are both doing a similar thing grammatically. They’re indicating this relationship between these two things – the newt and the eye, and the lizard and the leg.

Lauren: We can have different constructions doing the same thing. This thing is about a relationship between two entities. “Eye of newt” or “lizard’s leg” is a part-whole relationship where the eye is part of the newt.

Gretchen: But then there’s also “charm of powerful trouble,” which is not the same relationship as the eye of the newt. It’s not that the trouble has a charm. In this case, it’s using the same “of” to be part of the description.

Lauren: There’re a whole host of other possible relationships that can be expressed by “of” or “apostrophe S.”

Gretchen: We could talk about the “witch’s spellbook.”

Lauren: Is that the spellbook that the witch owns or is she the author of the spellbook?

Gretchen: This is one of the things about something like a book – is this my book that I wrote or my book that I just happen to be reading right now?

Lauren: One is a purchase or ownership relationship, and one is one of the ownership of the ideas rather than physical possession.

Gretchen: You can also have interpersonal relationships – the “wizard’s apprentice,” “my apprentice,” “my mentor.”

Lauren: I like that with these sometimes the interpersonal relationships are equal. If you’re my friend, then I’m your friend. And some of them have asymmetrical relationships. The mentor has an apprentice.

Gretchen: Or something like “the witch’s cat,” “the witch’s familiar,” or maybe “the cat’s witch,” depending on whether you’re taking the point of view of the cat.

Lauren: I guess when it comes to – I mean, with cats in particular it’s quite difficult, but when it comes to, say, pets, there’s a reciprocal relationship, but there is an assumption of ownership on behalf of the pet owner.

Gretchen: But sometimes, you know, people refer to themselves as being their cat’s “parents” or their cat’s “humans” and stuff as well.

Lauren: Yeah, I’m sure there’re plenty of cats that don’t feel like they are owned by anyone.

Gretchen: Particularly cats. Something like “the school of magic” – the magic isn’t even aware of owning the school. It’s just an association of a school with magic.

Lauren: Or “the colour of the toadstool” – it’s about the characteristic.

Gretchen: Or something like, “the cauldron of silver” – the cauldron is made out of silver – “a vial of poison” – the poison is contained in the vial.

Lauren: The vial is not made of poison. “The cauldron of silver” and “the vial of poison” have different relationships there.

Gretchen: One that I really like is constructions like, “tomorrow’s weather,” because it’s really clear that that’s just weather that has an association with tomorrow. It’s not that tomorrow somehow possesses the weather because these are both abstract concepts, and what would that even mean.

Lauren: Yeah, or just a kind of general relationship of proximity. Like, “the demon of the night” is not owned by the night. You can’t really say, “the night’s demon,” or “Zelda’s legend.”

Gretchen: Do you mean Legend of Zelda, like the video game?

Lauren: Yeah, I do.

Gretchen: I think “demon of the knight” works in this ownership relationship if it’s “K-N-I-G-H-T.”

Lauren: Oh, yes.

Gretchen: And they’re, like, best buds or, you know, enemies to lovers 20,000 words.

Lauren: Whole different genre.

Gretchen: A whole different genre than the “demon of the K-N-I-G-H-T,” which is a demon that goes [ghost noise] on the knight.

Lauren: Something like “the philosopher’s stone” or “Dracula’s castle” where it’s sometimes about ownership or just attribution. I mean, Dracula definitely didn’t build the castle. Maybe Dracula did build the castle himself. Maybe he’s a multi-skilled vampire.

Gretchen: I think with “the philosopher’s stone,” there’s this idea that the philosopher or the alchemist was the one who created the stone, but then people have been trying to find the philosopher’s stone and take it for themselves as well.

Lauren: And Frankenstein definitely created “Frankenstein’s monster.” That’s the whole premise of the book.

Gretchen: That’s very true, yes. And then you have these very abstract relationships – something like “the haunting of the house” or “the house’s haunting,” again, this is a relationship between these two nouns, but it’s not clear that the haunting belongs to the house, or the house belongs to the haunting – whichever way you put it.

Lauren: I also like that sometimes the thing that is being possessed can just be left in context. If you had a witch named “Griselda” who opened up a café, you could just call it “Griselda’s.”

Gretchen: And even if you did call it something more fanciful, people who know you and know that it’s your café might still call it “Griselda’s” – “Griselda’s café,” “Griselda’s house,” “Oh, I’m going over to Griselda’s this evening” – and in context you know what that means.

Lauren: Sometimes, it’s about location, so “Count von Count of Sesame Street.” He is not possessed by Sesame Street; it’s just his location.

Gretchen: “The ghost of Christmas Past” is associated with Christmas Past. I dunno really if “possessed by” or “located in” quite works.

Lauren: “Wicked Witch of the West” – another one of those.

Gretchen: Yeah. I think “located in the west.”

Lauren: We have all of these different relationships that are marked using the same grammatical form, but the relationships can be quite different. It’s not necessarily about ownership or power necessarily.

Gretchen: Yeah, in fact, there was one statistical investigation of this type of relationship to see how many times is it used to represent like, “I own something. This is my cup,” and how many times is it used to represent other types of relationships or associations between words. In this study from 1940, by someone named Fries, found that it was only about 40% that were actually something like “my cup,” where I could be argued to own the cup. Sixty percent of these uses were something like, “tomorrow’s weather,” or “the haunting of the house,” where there really isn’t straightforwardly a possessive or ownership relationship. Yet, that being said, grammatically speaking, people often still use the word “possessive” or sometimes the term “genitive” to refer to this whole category of relationships even though the majority of them don’t necessarily express possession.

Lauren: We’re talking about grammatical possession not spiritual possession, but I’m determined to see how many haunted and spooky examples we can fit into this episode.

Gretchen: They do have a common origin – the idea that maybe an evil spirit might be in possession of your body. They’re almost as old – they’re both from around the 1500s, both uses of the word.

Lauren: Huh. Fascinating. I didn’t realise that they both went back to the same point.

Gretchen: Possession is such a cool grammatical relationship. It’s such a spoooooky grammatical relationship that because this general concept of a range of meanings around the association between two or more nouns is found in a whole bunch of languages, but there’s lots of different, subtle ways that languages do this general category of relationships in different ways.

Lauren: Some languages just straight up have things that can’t be in a possession relationship. Generally, you get things like rivers or stars can’t be in one of these possession constructions, or you have things that have to be possessed. In a language, you might typically see obligatory possession on domestic animals, but you can’t use it for wild animals.

Gretchen: I mean, I think, like, I’d be pretty surprised to see someone talking about “my sun” or “my moon” – in maybe a sufficiently sci-fi context where you have people living on different planets and different solar systems to be like, “Well, our moon is like this, and your guys’s moon over there on your planet (or your three moons) are like that,” or something like that. But I think this is pragmatically a bit odd in English even if grammatically you could say it. It’s just like, what would you mean by that? One example of this which is a more formal constraint and less about the particular meaning is that in Guaraní, which is an Indigenous language of Paraguay, there are certain types of nouns including animal names where you can’t just say something like, “my chicken,” the way you can say, “my mother.” You have to add an additional word. In this case, for a word like “chicken,” it’s a word that means, basically, “pet.” Instead of saying, “my chicken,” you have something like, “my pet chicken,” to indicate that this animal now belongs to the category of things that could be possessed. It’s not so much about, like, you know, people can’t possess animals because they’re fine to say, “my pet chicken,” you just need this additional word added in to do that. People find it confusing, or it sounds strange, if you don’t put that word in.

Lauren: The flip side is that there’re languages where you will have a word that can’t be used without the possessive construction. In Seko Pedang, which is an Austronesian language spoken on the island of Sulawesi, which is part of Indonesia, there’s a really great noun that means “basketful.” It’s quite a handy noun. But it can only be used in possessive constructions. You can’t just have the noun “basketful.” It has to be something like, “my basketful,” or “his basketful.”

Gretchen: Because the idea is if the basket is full of stuff, it’s because someone put it there intentionally, and they wanna keep using it.

Lauren: It’s clearly going to be someone’s basketful. The other example they give for a noun where it’s totally fine to not have it marked – it’s not like all nouns have to do this – is a shirt because you can buy a shirt or loan someone a shirt, the ownership relationship isn’t as important to the meaning.

Gretchen: This is an example of how I could make the same argument for “shirt” that someone has clearly made this shirt – shirts don’t just grow on the bushes and come into appearance – but in this language, it’s like, “Yeah, no, a shirt doesn’t have to belong to someone, but a basketful does have to belong to someone,” which is this very language-specific aspect of that.

Lauren: Yeah, and where you draw the line between what is required to be possessed – or in a language where it’s not grammatically possible to use a possession construction – that’s something you have to figure out for the particular language.

Gretchen: Are there any other languages you know that have these things that are obligatorily possessed or not possessed?

Lauren: I remember when I was learning Nepali, there is a particular set of small things that you tend to just have with you where you can’t use a possession construction. It’s considered weird and a bit unnecessary. Instead of saying, “my pen,” or “my change,” or “my cash,” I would say, “the pen with me,” or “the cash with me,” or “the bag with me.”

Gretchen: Is this like the difference between a disposable plastic shopping bag versus a nice tote bag or a purse or a knapsack that you’ve probably put money into and invested – you’d be attached to, and you’d be sad if you lost? Whereas if I lose a plastic shopping bag, I’m like, “Oh, well, I’ll just get another one. It’s fine.”

Lauren: I think if you had a beautiful fountain pen, it would be, “my pen,” but if you just have a Biro on you, you would say, “It’s with me.” I remember one time using the “Oh, that’s my bag” for a plastic shopping bag, and people thought it was very funny that I would feel the need to exert ownership over this transient thing.

Gretchen: It’s interesting that you can have both things that are too big and important, like the moon, for one person to assert ownership over them and also things like, I dunno, a safety pin, a cheap pen, a plastic bag.

Lauren: I mean, we kind of have this in English as well. I could say, “Do you have a pen on you?” or “Have you got any money on you?”

Gretchen: Oh, and you’re trying to separate me from the concept of the pen of like, “Maybe I’ll borrow your pen, and it’s just a cheap pen, and I might not give it back.”

Lauren: I mean, I’m definitely tying to separate you from the money, that’s why I’m trying to make you feel like it’s not yours, it’s just with you.

Gretchen: Whereas to say, like, “Oh, do you have a car on you, by any chance, that I could borrow?”

Lauren: I think the important thing with these distinctions is you can come up with a meaning-based rationalisation. I definitely had to do that with Nepali to get my head around the construction. But at the end of the day, it’s about what’s grammatical and not grammatical in a language and the lengths you have to go to to try and make it feel like a grammatical thing in your head.

Gretchen: One type of grammatical distinction that a lot of languages have some version of is this idea that there are some elements that’re intrinsically always possessable or in relationship to another entity, and there are some that have this optional relationship. But this happens really differently depending on which language which things go in this category or not.

Lauren: So, something like, “your arm,” is very much attached to you. That relationship cannot be ended easily, I would like to say.

Gretchen: Body parts are a really good example. Even if some terrible circumstance or some horrific horror-movie type circumstance happens, and it does get detached from your body, you’re still feeling very attached to it in an emotional way even if it’s not physically connected to you right now.

Lauren: Physical connection isn’t the only thing because family relationships are another kind of not-ending relationship that you have.

Gretchen: Family relationships are like, you’re not just a grandmother, you’re a grandmother to someone or several someones. There’s no being a grandmother in abstraction that exists without grandchildren to be a grandparent of. In a language like Ojibwe, for example, which is an Algonquian language spoken in Canada, “ninik” is “my arm,” but there’s no context in which a person just says, “*nik,” to mean “arm” in abstract the way you can in English. Or “nookmis” is “my grandmother,” but there’s no context in which you’d just say like, “*ookmis,” that’s not a word. No one goes around saying that to just mean “a grandmother” in abstract.

Lauren: They’ve got the little ungrammatical notations there [asterisks in the written example being drawn from].

Gretchen: But sometimes languages actually do let you make this fine-grained distinction between two different types of ways of possessing a noun. We have this example from Hawaiian, where they actually use two different ways to mark possession depending on whether it is this intrinsic association or it’s this external, separable association. If you say, “nā iwi o Pua,” this means, “Pua’s bones (in Pua’s body).” “Pua” is a person’s name.

Lauren: Right. Definitely intrinsically attached. Hard to end that relationship with your bones.

Gretchen: Very much so. But “Pua” could also be eating a nice chicken dinner, and then you might have, “nā iwi a Pua,” instead of “o Pua,” and this could mean, “Pua’s bones (as in the chicken bones that Pua is eating).” It’s like, “Pua, are you done with those bones yet, or are you gonna save them to make chicken stock with?” They no longer belong to the chicken because the chicken is no more. They belong to Pua but in a separable way where Pua could be like, “Actually, I’m not hungry for all of these. Would you like to have some?”

Lauren: What a neat little pair to show that distinction.

Gretchen: Yeah, it’s this very subtle distinction between what it means to own something in two different ways.

Lauren: I think it’s fair to say English doesn’t have this as a core feature. Because if you say something like, “She has her father’s eyes,” usually we mean that as, “Ah, she has the same coloured eyes as her father.” We could also imagine a fairly horrific context in which she has acquired her father’s eyes physically in her hand.

Gretchen: Because if you were to say, “She has her father’s book,” that doesn’t necessarily mean that her book resembles her father’s book. It probably means she borrowed this book from her father. But in the context of a thing like eyes, it’s really context and our knowledge of how eyes work that enable this to happen.

Lauren: There’s nothing grammatically distinct happening between those two there.

Gretchen: I’m thinking of the children’s book series Amelia Bedelia where sometimes Amelia Bedelia takes on these very literal interpretations of what someone said. I can picture Amelia Bedelia being like, “Oh, you want me to have my father’s eyes? Okay.” [Plucking noise] Plucks the eyeballs out, and you’re like, “Amelia Bedelia, no, don’t do it!”

Lauren: Okay, yeah, we’ll save that for the Amelia Bedelia horror fanfic community. Free idea right there.

Gretchen: Body parts and kinship terms are the most common types of meanings that are expressed by this grammatically different type of possession, but other things that sometimes have a special possession marking are social relationships like a trading partner or a neighbour or a friend. You can’t just be a friend in isolation. You have to be a friend “of” someone, or you have to be a neighbour “of” someone.

Lauren: That makes sense.

Gretchen: Also, part-whole relationships, like “the tabletop” is part of the table. The top doesn’t exist without the table also existing – “the side of the table” – things that originate from someone, like your sweat or your voice, again, hard to imagine them existing without a body to put them into existence. Mental states and processes like fear or surprise, which only exist because someone gives rise to them. And also, sometimes attributes like a name or an age, which you can sometimes conceive of as “What does an age mean unless it’s an age of someone? Otherwise, it’s just a number.”

Lauren: And someone’s name is always attached to a someone, so that also makes sense.

Gretchen: I mean, sometimes you can say like, “How many people do you know named ‘John’?” or something like that, which could separate it out, but languages don’t necessarily include all of these categories. These are just some that, depending on the language, they’re gonna either group with this intrinsically possessed group or say, “No, we can conceive of these as being potentially separate.”

Lauren: I think it’s very satisfying for the theme of this episode that the technical term for this is about whether something is “inseparable” and, therefore, “inalienable,” or if something is “separate” or can be terminated in a relationship and, therefore, is “alienable.”

Gretchen: Because you could also dress up as a spooky alien!

Lauren: Yeah, that’s entirely why. Alienable possession is a great spooky linguistics costume.

Gretchen: You can imagine the spooky aliens being able to detach their heads from their bodies and move at a distance or something like this – some headless horseman or dressed up as Marie Antoinette and carry your own head around on a platter type of the costume.

Lauren: Oh, I like that. And then most of the most non-linguists will think you’re Marie Antoinette, and most of the linguists will think you are alienable possession. Very good.

Gretchen: Definitely we can save this for our linguist costume party where we dress up as our favourite linguistic examples.

Lauren: Because there’re all kinds of relationships, and they need to be navigated, languages that have this alienable / inalienable distinction can come up with really interesting ways of dealing with both of those relationships. In Navajo, you have a word like “milk” that is intrinsically related to an individual. If you were to say, “bibe',” which is “her milk,” you can also have a form that is “'abe',” which is “something’s milk.” It’s handy if you don’t need to know which particular cow or soybeans your milk came from. Then if she goes to the store and buys some milk, it’s “be'abe'.”

Gretchen: This is like, “her something’s milk.”

Lauren: Yes.

Gretchen: It’s got both this unspecified aspect of like, “Well, the milk come from some entity,” but then also, she’s brought home the carton from the store.

Lauren: If you’re in a house with feeding parents, you really wanna be clear when someone says, “Oh, that’s her milk in the fridge.” Navajo conveniently makes that distinction. If it’s her milk that she’s bought – hands off. That’s for her cup of tea. Or if it’s milk for the baby.

Gretchen: But it’s got this interesting double possession. When we were doing research for this episode and coming up with lots of fairly typical examples of possession, and I was very unsurprised to see these examples like Ojibwe and Navajo and Guaraní because this distinction between alienable and inalienable possession is very characteristic of languages of the Americas – North and South America. A lot of them have this particular distinction. Even ones that linguists don’t typically consider “related” in a historic sense, there is, I guess, enough language contact and various things that, like, lots of languages of this area have them. Then I read that French has this distinction, and I was like, “Hang on, I speak French.”

Lauren: Hang on, you speak French.

Gretchen: How have I never noticed that French has this distinction? I’m familiar with the distinction, and I’m quite familiar with French.

Lauren: This was a surprise to you.

Gretchen: It had never occurred to me that French actually has this distinction, but it’s there. I've produced it.

Lauren: Amazing. How does it work in French?

Gretchen: In French this is only with body parts. This is a really good example of languages will sometimes pick up one area of the stuff that can be intrinsically possessed. French doesn’t even do it with kinship terms, which is another area that’s super common. It’s only body parts for French. You can say something like, “Je me lave les mains,” which literally means, “I wash myself the hands,” but is the idiomatic way of saying, “I wash my hands.” But you can only do this for body parts. I can say, “Je me lave les cheveux,” “I wash myself the hair,” and other parts of the body.

Lauren: So, there’s no specific “apostrophe S” equivalent possession thing in there; it’s just because it’s a body part, and it’s myself.

Gretchen: And it’s reflexive, yeah. It’s “I wash myself the hands.” It’s not just “I wash the hands.” It’s like, “I wash myself the hands.” But if you wanna say like, “I wash the horse” – or “I wash my horse” – you would say, “Je lave mon cheval.” If you go around saying, “Je me lave le cheval” –

Lauren: “I washed myself the horse.”

Gretchen: – it really starts to imply that the horse is part of me.

Lauren: Are you a centaur?

Gretchen: Maybe I’m a centaur in this situation, and I refer to my lower half as “the horse.”

Lauren: Whereas in English, “I washed my hands” and “I washed my horse,” you’re just using the “my” construction. It doesn’t matter if it’s a body part.

Gretchen: I’m using the same construction, yeah, exactly. I can’t do this – like, if I have to give a child a bath, I can say, “Je lave l’enfant,” or “Je lave mon enfant,” if it’s my kid, but if I say, “Je me lave l’enfant” –

Lauren: “I washed myself the child.”

Gretchen: I think that – “Je me lave le bébé” – maybe if I was pregnant, and the baby was in my belly, and I was joking about washing my belly as if it was washing the kid or something.

Lauren: You’re getting into very specific contexts to make sense.

Gretchen: Very specific scenarios. I was texting some other friends who speak French because I was like, “Is this just me because I know that I sometimes have intuitions about French, and sometimes I don’t,” but I was really getting – especially with “Je me lave l’auto,” “I wash myself the car,” which really implies that I’m in some sort of transformers mech suit situation where I am the car. There’s no other meaning of that.

Lauren: Right. What about something that’s really close to being a body part but not quite, like if you had to wash your shadow?

Gretchen: Well, okay, pragmatically, I don’t think I can wash my shadow, but I can see my shadow, and that’s reflexive, too.

Lauren: Okay, yeah. I’ll be very kind and give you an example sentence that’s almost sensical, sure.

Gretchen: I think I still have to say, “Je vois mon ombre,” I can’t say, “Je me vois l’ombre,” where “I see myself the shadow,” in the way I can say, “Je me vois le visage,” “I see myself the face.” I think I can say that. I did text a few people to check this, and I also did a Google search, and there’s lots of Google results for “Je vois mon ombre,” but there are literally zero Google hits for “Je me vois l’ombre,” which is like, “I see myself the shadow” – the one that’s for body parts. There’re literally zero Google hits, although I guess there’ll be one once this episode is published because we have transcripts. But yeah, it turns out that there are actually a bunch of European languages that do something similar with specifically body part possession. German does something similar, “I wash myself the hands.” Italian does something similar, “I wash myself the hands.” It’s specifically very body part-y, which raises the question of why English doesn’t do it. To be honest, I don’t know.

Lauren: We’re missing out, English.

Gretchen: This is something that is also going on in other language families in this slightly different way where you don’t have kindship terms involved.

Lauren: English doesn’t have this, but we do have the benefit of having three completely different ways of marking possession. We have that “plural S,” we have “of,” and we have “have.”

Gretchen: “We have ‘have’.” English possesses three strategies.

Lauren: Let’s start with “apostrophe S.”

Gretchen: I like “apostrophe S” because it’s really, really old as a possessive strategy when using it in English. Old English had lots of suffixes on the ends of nouns that indicated their role in the sentence. The surviving one – the one that’s still kicking around – is this Modern English “apostrophe S.”

Lauren: It’s a relic.

Gretchen: It’s a zombie!

Lauren: Definitely the zombies are – this is part of why pronouns – so it’s possessive “mine,” “yours,” “theirs.” That’s why they also have those. “Mine” is slightly different because there used to be a whole bunch of different endings.

Gretchen: This changing in the endings of the nouns to show what their relationship is to the rest of the sentence is a phenomenon known as “case,” which we’re not gonna get into in detail. It is marking things in relationship to other things.

Lauren: Which you is a thing you can see is really handy because there’re all kinds of relationships we’re navigating all the time of, especially, family relationships. We all grow up in contexts where there are, maybe, kids or siblings or grandparents, and this all needs to be figured out in terms of like, “This is my sister,” and “That’s my mom’s daughter.”

Gretchen: I love this thing that you get with kids around age 3 or so where they’re beginning to realise that the person they might call “Mom” is not a person everyone else also calls “Mom” because other people might have their own mom or might not have a mom. Not everyone’s mom is that one person.

Lauren: Also, who everyone is to everyone else. Like, “my sister” is going to be “their aunt.”

Gretchen: Right. There’s this very fun example that I came across on Twitter where this guy says, “This kid pointed at my dog and said to his mom, ‘Nice doggie,’ and then pointed at me and went, ‘That’s his dad’.” But the guy is like, “Technically, though, as my dog used to stay with my grannie and granda, and they refer to themselves as his ‘ma’ and ‘da,’ the dog is actually my uncle.”

Lauren: Amazing. I’m glad he’s taking this relationship very seriously and triangulating it within the family space.

Gretchen: What’s interesting about this ending situation is that the Old English ending was “-es” for the possessive for a lot of the nouns, but some of the other nouns had other endings as well. By the 16th Century, this “-es” ending got generalised to all of the nouns. Then gradually the spelling “-es” remained, but in many words, the letter E was no longer being pronounced.

Lauren: Oh, so by the 16th Century, it was the way it’s pronounced now.

Gretchen: Basically, yeah. Instead of having “cat / cat-ES,” for “the cat’s tail,” you would just have “cat / cats,” much like we have now. Although, there are still some words in English – words ending in S or in another sibilant sound – that still have that “-es” ending, like “the fox’s tail.” Printers started copying the French practice of substituting this apostrophe for this letter E that wasn’t pronounced anymore.

Lauren: Ah, so that apostrophe is actually a ghost – keeping with our haunted episode theme.

Gretchen: It is a ghost of an E that once was there.

Lauren: Hmm, spooky~~~

Gretchen: Spooky. But it’s pronounced, at this point, the same way as the plural, like, “the cat’s tail” versus “I saw two cats” is pronounced the same. This apostrophe – if you get confused about apostrophe usage – you can blame these Early-Modern English printers because, honestly, this situation was not necessary, and we actually would’ve been fine with no apostrophe at all because this works fine in the spoken language.

Lauren: It even created a bit more confusion because there was some point a century after the apostrophe, and people started assuming that the S was “his” as like, the other possessive form that finished in an S. So, you found people saying things like, “Saint James-his Park” rather than “Saint James’s Park.”

Gretchen: Exactly. It’s just been the source of so much unnecessary confusion. Modern English speakers sure don’t think of it as like, “Oh, it’s just this short form of this thing that existed” because like, we don’t remember that this used to be an “-es.” That was hundreds of years ago. But once you’ve learned these very annoying rules, it does help us identify it – at least to talk about it in the possessive form – which brings us to “of.”

Lauren: Which is our second possessive construction and in Old English meant “away” or “away from.”

Gretchen: Wait, is “of” related to “off”? Because that also feels like what “off” means.

Lauren: Apparently, yeah. “Off” was an emphatic form of “of of,” and then they diverged into their own little lanes.

Gretchen: Oh, neat.

Lauren: But that “from” gives you an idea of how this locational sense of the construction works.

Gretchen: I feel like “of” gets used to translate “de” from Old French or “de” from Latin, so that often the English constructions that have an “of” in them feel maybe a little bit more Latin-y or French-y, a bit more formal maybe.

Lauren: Yeah, I can see that. Like, “The Leaning Tower of Pisa” definitely sounds fancier than “Pisa’s Leaning Tower.”

Gretchen: [Laughs] Oh, you mean we could’ve been saying “Liberty’s Statue” instead of the “Statue of Liberty” this whole time?

Lauren: Oh, that does not work for me. I think it’s partly because it’s a set phrase, but also partly because that “apostrophe S” does just sound a little bit more informal.

Gretchen: Maybe because the “of” has a little bit more of a tendency to be locational in the “from” sense, which is there etymologically rather than just associated with. But I do find it fun to just think about examples of set phrases that either have “of” or “apostrophe S” in and see how they feel when you swap them. Like, “China’s Great Wall” or “Giza’s Great Pyramid.”

Lauren: “Paradox of Zeno.”

Gretchen: “The Law of Murphy.” As we were preparing this episode, I just spent several days going around my life noticing these and flipping them in my mind, so I hope that I have now infected everybody with that.

Lauren: The distinction between “apostrophe S” and “of” constructions can also give you – as an English speaker – a little bit of an alienable / inalienable distinction sense. For these kinds of constructions, you can say something like, “the brother of Mary.”

Gretchen: Which is just as good as “Mary’s brother.” They sound the same to me.

Lauren: Which is just as good as “Mary’s brother.” But if you had something that is more alienable and less of an intrinsic relationship – something like, “the bat of Mary.”

Gretchen: Versus “Mary’s bat.” Mary could have a pet bat. But “the bat of Mary,” I’m just getting a little bit confused in the way that I wasn’t with “the brother of Mary.”

Lauren: It’s been argued that this is because kinship relationships are more intrinsic and inalienable and closer than a general possession relationship, and that’s why it sounds less natural. Our final possessive structure in English is the use of “have” as a verb.

Gretchen: In English, we can say something like, “I have some candy.” This is fine. But some languages don’t have a specific verb that indicates possession. They, instead, use a different strategy to say a full sentence that’s a possessive. The one that I’m most familiar with – and this one happens in Scottish Gaelic and also Hindi, which are two Indo-European languages spoken very far from each other, which translates as something more like, “at me is some candy.”

Lauren: That’s kind of what that Nepali “with me is a pen” construction is doing. Nepali and Hindi are very closely related languages, so that makes sense.

Gretchen: There’s other constructions like “Mine is some candy” or “Some candy is mine.” I think this is similar to what Finnish does, where you have a possessive but not in the verb. There’s an example from Tondano, which is an Austronesian language spoken in northern Sulawesi. The broad translation that you might use in English is “The man has two houses,” but it’s something more like, “As far as the man is concerned, there are two houses.”

Lauren: Right. It’s kind of like “the man,” and then you’re drawing attention to the man as the one doing the possessing, and then the thing that’s being possessed is just there.

Gretchen: “The man” is the topic of the sentence, and then “There are two houses,” and so you infer this relationship between them. You can paraphrase it in various long English ways like –

Lauren: “As far as the man is concerned.”

Gretchen: “Speaking about the man,” “with regard to the man.” I like to think of it also in e-mail style as like, “Re: me, various candy.”

Lauren: I like that. I think that’s getting much more at the grammatical structure of that.

Gretchen: Well, because these topicalising words tend to be really short because they’re used a lot in languages that have them. I just think that saying like, “as far as X is concerned,” makes it sounds really clunky, whereas if you’re just like, “Re: the man, candy,” it gets forward how concise this can also be.

Lauren: We know that candy doesn’t own the man. We know it’s the man that has the candy.

Gretchen: Well, and if you wanted to convey the inverse, you’d have to say, “Re: the candy, the man.”

Lauren: It’s another horror movie premise.

Gretchen: Exactly. Like, “Woo, spooky candy possessing people.” [Lauren laughs] You can also do things like, “I am with some candy,” “me and a candy,” “me – candy, too,” with sorts of “with” styles of possessive. And even just putting the two nouns next to each other and, again, inferring this type of relationship – maybe the ordering has some sort of effect like, “the child, candy,” and you can infer a sort of adjective-y relationship with them.

Lauren: It’s also worth noting for languages that do have a verb like English “have,” it’s usually from some kind of verb that indicates physical control or handling. In English, “have” has become our verb, but in other languages, it can be a verb that’s more like “take” or “grasp” or “hold” or “carry.” You can kind of see how all of those indicate some kind of possessing relationship that then goes on to be a general possession verb.

Gretchen: And “have” itself comes from a Proto-Indo-European root that means, “to grasp” – “*kap-” meaning “to grasp.”

Lauren: All of this is just a really nice reminder that you can start with this general idea of a relationship between two things, but languages are gonna use a whole bunch of different strategies for putting that into the grammar.

Gretchen: And “possession” is the most common word used to describe this in English even though it has this connotation of being very possessive about something or this, maybe, capitalistic possession and ownership – or being haunted. Another word that’s used to describe this in a formal grammar sense is “genitive,” which comes from a root meaning “to generate” or “progeny,” like “give birth to.”

Lauren: Okay, one of those relationships that we’ve seen a lot of – interpersonal relationships.

Gretchen: Exactly. This category of relationship is often named for one of its prototypical relationships, and then there’s a whole bunch of other things that get subsumed into that category because the same grammatical construction – you pick one of its prototypical uses, and then you extend it to a whole bunch of other types of meaning-based relationships even though the grammar-based one is the same across the whole category.

Lauren: I think it’s always good to remember that there are all of these different kinds of relationships that get caught up within this one grammatical category, and if I say, “They’re my student,” or “They’re my child,” it doesn’t mean they are my possession in a capitalistic, “ownership of” way. It’s just a way of indicating this relationship between us.

Gretchen: In fact, if someone is your student or your child, they also have a possessive relationship with you. You’re their advisor or their mentor or their professor or their parent. So, in many cases, these possessive relationships have a really important element of reciprocity that we’re each other’s friends or neighbours, or that parent-child or mentor-mentee have an element where the possession goes both ways because it situates us in some of the ways we relate to each other. Languages have lots of different ways of expressing these types of relationships between beings and elements of the world, but it’s very, very common cross-linguistically to have some way of doing this category of relationships, which suggests that it’s something that’s really important to all of us and part of our shared humanity.

[Music]

Lauren: For more Lingthusiasm and links to all the things mentioned in this episode, go to lingthusiasm.com. You can listen to us on all the podcast platforms or lingthusiasm.com. You can get transcripts of every episode on lingthusiasm.com/transcripts. You can follow @lingthusiasm on all the social media sites. You can get scarves with lots of linguistics patterns on them including Gavagai, IPA, branching tree diagrams, bouba and kiki, and our favourite esoteric Unicode symbols, plus other Lingthusiasm merch – like our new “Ask Me About Linguistics” stickers and “More People Have Read the Text on This Shirt Than I Have” t-shirts – at lingthusiasm.com/merch. My social media and blog is Superlinguo.

Gretchen: Links to my social media can be found at gretchenmcculloch.com. My blog is AllThingsLinguistic.com. My book about internet language is called Because Internet. Lingthusiasm is able to keep existing thanks to the support of our patrons. If you wanna get an extra Lingthusiasm episode to listen to every month, our entire archive of bonus episodes to listen to right now, or if you just wanna help us keep the show running ad-free, go to patreon.com/lingthusiasm or follow the links from our website. Patrons can also get access to our Discord chatroom to talk with other linguistics fans and be the first to find out about new merch and other announcements. Recent bonus episodes include alien languages and whether we could figure them out, a behind-the-scenes on Tom Scott’s Language Files (which we collaborated on), and why the word “do” in English is so weird. Can’t afford to pledge? That’s okay, too. We also really appreciate it if you can recommend Lingthusiasm to anyone in your life who’s curious about language.

Lauren: Lingthusiasm is created and produced by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Our Senior Producer is Claire Gawne, our Editorial Producer is Sarah Dopierala, our Production Assistant is Martha Tsutsui-Billins, and our Editorial Assistant is Jon Kruk. Our music is “Ancient City” by The Triangles.

Gretchen: Stay lingthusiastic!

[Music]

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