Thursday 3 July 2014

received pronunciation

I wonder when and why 'tis, archaic but a formal elision in the English language—for it is and possibly with a grammatical mandate that one finds in other languages, like French and German, was transformed into the more familiar, yet considered acceptable only in speech and not committed to paper (though those standards are generally relaxed), contraction it's.
Attested use of 'tis extends back to the year 1450, but I suspect it was spoken for generations before being committed to paper, and it's appeared from the late 1600s on, around the same time as English writing started using an apostrophe (adopted from the French style) to stand in for the lost letters and sounds. Both flow when spoken, as do dozens of others, but given the legacy of certain well-defined instances of stock-phrases where 'tis does not ring as antique, I wonder what caused this shift from fore to aft. With the exception of won't, most English contractions are not really economising agents, usually just exchanging in print one character for another—whereas with Norse languages, at least in regional parlance, whole hackneyed phrases could be expressed with brevity, though not necessarily intelligibility outside of ones region. 'Twas is also a good question over it's—it is, it was or carelessly possessive. Like with the case of 'tis and it's, I wonder if there are any other historical examples, not frozen by song or tale, where there was a similar sort of reshuffling and an abbreviation that was rearranged. Once upon a time cannot was rendered ca'n't.