What’s missing in the King James Bible?

King James’ scholars translated Hebrew, Greek and Latin texts into English. Hebrew has symbols that look like apostrophes and quote marks, but serve totally different linguistic functions; geresh acts like a period and gershayim signals that a word is an acronym. Ancient Greek writers used apostrophes to replace a letter omitted from the end of one word because the same letter immediately followed it in the next word; that is, if you read the words out loud, you wouldn’t hear two identical sounds. Up until the 16th century the goal of writing was to convey the sense of what was said out loud, so the Greeks didn’t waste strokes on what amounted to silent letters. As for Latin, the Romans never picked up the use of apostrophes from the Greeks — odd, since the Italians stole so much else from their Hellenistic neighbors — so later scholars had no familiarity with it.

Contractions’ history ’tis a diff’rent story. Contractions have been around for millennia in multiple languages. The Greeks had ’em, so’d the Chinese. Snobs sometimes consider it lazy speech to drawl two words together, which is why polite society periodically condemns the use of contractions. My favorite example is the 19th century and later English teachers who condemned Mark Twain’s free and unapologetic use of contractions in “Huckleberry Finn,” but said nothing about his use of the “N” word. Ain’t no accountin’ for taste, but what’s clear from Shakespeare and his contemporaries is that British writers at the time of King James had no such aversion to the use of contractions. “Wynnot” for “will not” appeared in the 1400s, Shakespeare probably was a teenager when he heard the contraction as “wonnot” in the 1500s and it was in common use as “wont” by the mid-1600s. Soon after that “won’t” acquired an apostrophe.

It was the French who reinvented the apostrophe in the 16th century, using it somewhat as the Greeks did; that is, to replace unwritten but implied vowels. The difference was that the French used apostrophes inside phrases, such as l’homme (le+homme) and c’est (ce+est) la vie. Britishers who read and spoke some French began to recognize the apostrophe, and the first French-English dictionary, published in 1611, had a definition of the apostrophe. That was the same year the KJV came out.

English gradually began to incorporate the apostrophe in contractions, but never as much as French did (it’s said that French today uses 20 apostrophes for every one in English). Actually, the use of apostrophes in English didn’t really take off until the 18th century when an apostrophe+s began to signify the possessive (Sheila’s, Mike’s, Matt’s). This was not a good thing, because scholars could write King James’ Bible or King James’s Bible, which ignited new battles among grammarians, and because of public school teachers’ waste of thousands of hours in fruitless attempts to teach their students’ apostrophe+s’s use.