Entertainment / Literature / His-Genitive: An unusual use of his, her, and their as the sign of the genitive by attaching them to the end of a word or locating them immediately after a word. Algeo notes this became common primarily in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries--though some rare examples appear as early as King Alfred's ninth-century translation of Orosius and Aelfric's tenth-century translation of the Old Testament, where we find 'We gesawon Enac his cynryn' [We saw Anak's kindred] (see Algeo 179). For instance, one gloss to Spenser's Shepherd's Calendar of 1579 uses the phrase 'Augustus his daughter' when modern speakers would write 'Augustus's daughter.' The use of this possessive pronoun after a noun might have arisen from the mistaken belief that the -'s ending in possessive words was an abbreviated form of the pronoun his. In actual fact, the -'s ending is a remnant of an ancient genitive marker (-es) that attached to certain Anglo-Saxon words to show possession.
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