more excrescent "'s"

[Arnold M. Zwicky]

On Apr 30, 2007, at 6:05 AM, Charlie Doyle wrote:

> "How comes?" (with its 300,000+ Google hits--not all of them
> pertinent, of course): perhaps an ellipsis of the idiom "How comes
> it that . . .?"...

this hadn't occurred to me in my previous collection of examples,
perhaps because i started with "all's" (in things like "all's I know
is that..."), which originated as a contraction (of "all" +
relativizer "as") and was then often spelled without the apostrophe.
and because the other cases i looked at -- "how's come", "how's
about", "how about's", "what about's", "what's about", "what's if",
and "how's to" all pretty clearly derive from a variant without the
"'s" (that is, the sibilant really is excrescent), rather than from a
reinterpretation of a 3sg sibilant suffix.  all of these have variant
spellings without the apostrophe, but these have no more plausible
sources than the apostrophized versions.

the scenario
   (1) how comes it that S > (2) how comes S (with subsequent re-
spelling as (3) how come's S)
would predict that (1) and (2) coexisted for some time (before (1)
dropped out for almost everybody), and that (2) appeared before (3).
these predictions are, in principle, testable, though that would be
*quite* a project.

my previous speculation was that the versions with the sibilant on
the second word were derived from the versions with the (excrescent)
sibilant on the first word. ("how's to" hasn't gone this route yet,
and "what's if" might have just started, though it's hard to sort
through all those examples of "what if(')s".)

of course, for "how comes(')s", two sources could have reinforced one
another.

arnold

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