[etni] not completely redundant
- From: David Reid <reidnomad@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: etni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Sat, 29 Oct 2011 08:26:58 +0200
Hello, ETNI'ers,
Sandy Regev asked the question as to why one uses the possessive after "of",
and gave the example of "a friend of Lenny's". Mona Shreiber tried to
explained it by giving another example, "a friend of mine", which only
begged the question. It is tempting to dismiss this redundancy as the
result of widespread sloppy English, and perhaps this is indeed sufficient.
However, since sloppy English often arises from its own internal logic,
there may be a deeper etymology at work here. The key is the indefinite
article. In "she is a friend of Lenny's", "a" = "one of", and "Lenny's" =
"Lenny's friends". "He is my friend", has a difference of nuance to "he is a
friend of mine", in that the former allows the possibility the speaker has
only one friend, while the latter, abbreviated from "he is one of my
friends", hints that one has more than one friend.
David Reid
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