"Deppenapostrophe": Is English guilty after all?
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Andreas Stolcke responds to "English is innocent" (10/10/2024):
The historical facts cited are correct, but they don't explain why the frequency of 's rose in the post-WW2 period, and again after about 2005 (= the internet), as indicated by the Google Ngram plot below.
The bump in the post-war era (after 1957) could be an effect of the Allied occupation (delayed by the book publishing process), which was reversed by the mid-1990s, and then encouraged again by the internet half a century later.
So my bet is still on an English (language) influence.
However, it is true that use of genitive apostrophes was once much more pervasive, and dropped precipitously after around 1890, which is when Duden published his dictionary, which attained prescriptive (official) status in 1902. The mid-20th-century recovery was small in comparison to the earlier levels. All of this is nicely illustrated by Google Ngrams over the full time period:
WINIFER KINGSLEY SKATTEBOL said,
October 12, 2024 @ 8:27 pm
What I mourn in editing is the 's before the gerund, e.g. "It was a case of her sister's being more popular" rather than "It was a case of her sister being more popular."
AntC said,
October 12, 2024 @ 9:19 pm
Thanks Andreas, that's a great use of Ngrams.