His genitive

The his genitive is a means of forming a genitive construction by linking two nouns with a possessive pronoun such as "his" (e.g. "my friend his car" instead of "my friend's car"). This construction enjoyed only a brief heyday in English in the late 16th century and the 17th century, but is common in some of the dialects of a number of Germanic languages, and standard in Afrikaans.

In Early Modern English, the orthographic practice developed of marking the genitive case by inserting the word "his" between the possessor noun, especially where it ended in -s, and the following possessed noun. The heyday of this construction, employed by John Lyly, Euphues His England (1580), the poem Willobie His Avisa (1594), in the travel accounts under the title Purchas His Pilgrimes (1602), Ben Jonson's Sejanus His Fall (1603) or John Donne's Ignatius His Conclave (1611), was the late 16th and early 17th century. For example, in 1622, the Holy Roman Emperor's ambassador in London "ran at tilt in the Prince his company with Lord Montjoy". The term "his genitive" may refer either to marking genitives with "his" as a reflexive or intensifying marker or, much more precisely, the practice of using "his" instead of an -s. Therefore, use of the "his" genitive in writing occurred throughout later Middle English and early Modern English as an intensifier, but as a replacement marker only for a brief time.

In Old English, the genitive case was marked most often by an "-es" ending for masculine and neuter nouns, although it was marked with other suffixes or by umlaut with many nouns. There are no unassailable examples of the "his genitive" in Anglo-Saxon. Although a small number of examples were produced by earlier scholars to show that the "his genitive" can be traced back to Old English, Allen examines every putative example of the "his" genitive that has been presented from Old English and finds them all to be subject to other possible analyses. The first clear examples of the "his" genitive do not appear until c. 1250, when the -s ending had extended to all noun classes and NP-internal agreement had disappeared, making the -s ending the sole marker of genitive case..

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