BONUS: History of the apostrophe | The Apostrophe | Punctuation | Khan Academy Video Lecture | Complete Course on English Grammar: Upgrade your Speaking & Listening - Personal Skills

hello grammarians historians and
linguists David here with Paige hi and
Jake hey and we're going to 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 um it's turning
away from your actual audience to
deliver a message to absent people or
inanimate objects or um just non
personified you're trying to personify a
nut and inhuman concept so before it was
a punctuation mark it was a literary
technique yes it was a turn of as 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
four 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
instance the note 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 to absent 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 Lloyd Holly 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 may 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 Oh
meaning the our Tory would have it know
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 going to be
you know this intelligentsia 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 for blatant you have in
Latin these long definite articles like
la I ll e
or ela il la 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 Lani Co 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 use it in
every which way but loose you know so
they're using it like this to 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