BONUS VIDEO – History of the apostrophe
Narrator places Geoffroy Tory's introduction of the apostrophe in the 1580s (Tory died in 1533; it was around 1529) and says England had been 'under French rule for centuries' by the 16th century. Interventions avoid testing these dates/claims.
The check-ins use the correct version. The video is Khan Academy's, unchanged.About this video
David, Paige and Jake trace the history of the apostrophe. The word comes from Greek for "turning away" and first named a figure of speech where a speaker addresses someone or something absent, like a dagger or the moon. That idea of absence led to the punctuation mark standing in for missing letters, which spread from French into English (as in I'm) and is used across the Romance languages.
You'll be able to
- explain what apostrophe means as a figure of speech.
- explain how the idea of something absent connects to the apostrophe punctuation mark.
- describe how the apostrophe spread from French into English and other languages.
Key words
- apostrophe (figure of speech)
- Speaking directly to someone absent or to a non-living thing, like "O happy dagger".
- apostrophe (punctuation)
- The mark (') that stands in for missing letters, as in I'm or l'heure.
- rhetoric
- The art of speaking or writing to persuade or move an audience.
- Romance languages
- Languages that came from Latin, such as French, Italian and Spanish.
- personify
- To treat a non-human thing as if it were a person.
Transcript
- [Voiceover] Hello grammarians, historians, and linguists. David here with Paige.
- [Voiceover] Hi. - [Voiceover] And Jake. - [Voiceover] Hey.
- [Voiceover] And we're gonna talk about the history of the apostrophe. The apostrophe isn't just a punctuation mark. In fact, the word apostrophe comes to us from Greek, from two different compounds. "Apo," meaning "away," and "stroph," meaning "to turn." So it's a turning of strophe.
We need to turn away. So it's a turning away. 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 an inhuman concept.
- [Voiceover] So before it was a punctuation mark, it was a literary technique.
- [Voiceover] Yes, 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 "O, happy dagger," the speech from the end of Romeo and Juliet in act five.
Boom, sorry, y'all didn't see. I plunged the stylus into my breast. (giggles) "O, 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 H.M.S. Pinafore, there's a song, "Fair moon, to thee I sing, bright regent of the heavens." It's the moon. The moon can't talk back. It's the moon. 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 named Geoffroy Tory, I think, is how you would say his name.
That's a guess. And around the late 16th century, I think it's 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, "aime" meaning "loved," it would be "aime" 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 heure," meaning "the hour," Tory would have it "l'heure," like that. You know, and this apostrophe in 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 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 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?
- [Voiceover] 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 "ille," i l l e, or "illa," i l l a. And all the definite articles that come out of this in all the Romance languages take some fraction of the original from Latin and omit some part with an apostrophe.
So "amico" in Italian, to add a definite article to make it "the friend," you can add just l apostrophe. "L'amico."
- [Voiceover] Cool. So yeah, so during this time of apostrophe expansion across the continent, people are just going nuts, right? 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.
They're using it for contractions. They're using it for multiples of stuff, like stuff that we would consider incorrect today. Like "book's," like that. Wah, 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.
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