eli5: In english the s is sometimes contracted (she’s/she is or she has) but what does the s stand for when it’s possessive? Like the king’s crown? What word is that s?

Question

Truth be told, 90% of my english comes from Skyrim and Doctor Who, I remeber very few rules from my school days and it’s been bugging me for days and my research skills are bringing me no fruit. Help?

In: 14

Answer 1

In my 15 seconds of googling, apparently English used to put “es” at the end of words to show possession. The.example they gave mentioned “The Kinges garb…”

So I guess ‘s is just an abbreviation of “es”

Answer 2

It’s not a word, but a suffix, a morpheme.

But then what are those? Let’s start with a morpheme. It’s the smallest unit that carries/changes meaning.

Consider the word “blackberry.” It can be split into black and berry, and black means something and berry means something and you can’t split those into more pieces. So blackberry is two morphemes, black is one morpheme, berry is one morpheme.

Now consider the word “slowly.” It can be split into slow and -ly, so it’s two morphemes, but unlike berry, the -ly part cannot stand on its own.

The -ly is a morpheme stuck to the end of something else, and we call those kind of morphemes suffixes. (If they stick to the front you call them prefixes. If they stick in the middle you call them infixes. These are all affixes.)

The <’s> is just a way to spell the possessive suffix that comes there. It’s not a word on its own, but it’s added to change things into possessives. edit 2: and sometimes you just spell it <’> if the word ends with an <s> already. edit 3: it can get attached to whole phrases, like “the shop around the corner’s owner” (they own the shop, not the corner) so you could even argue it’s not a suffix, but a clitic.

edit: this is a synchronic view of how things stand today. On the other hand, as of this writing, the other reply has a diachronic view of how things led to this.