The following post is by Andrew Gaudio, Classics, Medieval Studies, Linguistics specialist in the Researcher Engagement & General Collections Division and currently on detail in the Rare Book and Special Collections Division. This post is a companion piece to the earlier post, American Classics.
Valuable for the study of provenance, bookplates, inscriptions, and marginalia convey important information about the history of a particular copy of a book, such as which institutions or persons owned it when, and how it was used. For instance, a common practice in the Early Modern to Modern period was for families to record genealogical data in the margins and blank pages of their bibles by listing the names of various family members along with dates of birth, death, and sometimes marriages. In addition to aiding provenance and genealogical study, ownership inscriptions reveal other interesting social and linguistic information about the people who created them. In Anglophone communities during the 16th – 18th centuries, as common custom, many book-owners added a note of ownership in their book in either English or in Latin. The Rare Book and Special Collections Division holds a number of examples of these notes that offer a curious study for those interested in historical linguistics.
Typically, book owners would write their inscription using the following formula: “[name of owner], his (or her) book.” If the inscription were written in Latin, it would follow the same formula: “[name of owner], eius liber.” Consider the inscription below, which reads “Francis Symes Ejus Liber,” – Latin for “Francis Symes his book.” (Note that the “j” and the “i” in the word eius are interchangeable).
Some inscriptions — such as the note in the image below from a book published in 1580 — include dates, which are always helpful for historians. The note below, which was written much later than the book’s initial printing and sale, states “Gulielmus Hare, ejus liber, anno dom 1719” which in English means “William Hare, his book, in the year of our Lord 1719.”
Some indications of ownership, like the one pictured below, are very elaborate and quite beautiful. This inscription, which says “Alexander White ejus liber,” was written in a very elegant cursive that is complete with flourishes and a pleasing design underneath the owner’s name.
Other inscriptions are written in less practiced hands, such as the one below. Written in English dated 1760 from a book published in 1621, Alexander Dallas’ note reminds contemporary readers that English spelling was not yet standardized.
Now that some examples of these ownership inscriptions have been seen in both English and in Latin, let’s think about their linguistic implications.
As this English example from 1760 (above) evinces, the typical ownership statement consisted of the following components: “[the name of the owner] his (or her) book.” Since Latin was commonly used among the educated classes, who would oftentimes possess their own books, these notes of ownership were frequently written in Latin.
However, if you have ever taken Latin in school, then your teacher probably would not approve of the Latin translation of “his book” as “ejus liber.” For those who have studied Latin, you may remember a category of pronouns called demonstrative pronouns and another category called reflexive. Demonstrative pronouns never refer to the subject of a sentence or statement, whereas reflexive pronouns always refer to the subject. The demonstrative pronoun ejus is the genitive case of the nominative pronouns is, ea and id. A literal translation of ejus is “of him” or “of her”. Therefore, the inscription “Francis Symes ejus liber” literally means “Francis Symes, the book of him” which is translated as “Francis Symes, his book.”
Everything seems to be in order until you recall that demonstrative pronouns do not refer to the subject of a sentence but to a third person. As such, ejus in these statements of ownership does not refer to the names of people who own the books, but to a different third person.
In “Francis Symes, ejus liber,” “ejus” meaning “his” does not refer to Francis but to someone else. To indicate that the book belongs to the name of the owner, the reflexive possessive suus should be used. Suus is the masculine form of the nominative reflexive possessive and means “his own” or “her own.” Note that the gender of suus is influenced by the noun possessed, and not by the gender of the person who possesses the object. If a woman owns a book, because the book is a masculine noun, the masculine form suus rather than the feminine sua would still be used. Since suus refers to the subject of a sentence or statement, in proper classical Latin, the inscription would be “Francis Symes, suus liber” and can be translated into English as “Francis Symes, his own book.”
There is no reason to believe that those who knew Latin were unaware of this grammatical aberration. Latin grammar books from the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries warn against such errors. The admonishment pictured above from Thomas Watt’s Grammar Made Easy, labels this very grammatical distinction as the first caution in a list of mistakes that should be avoided.
Similarly, Garretson’s English Exercises for School-boys to Translate into Latin, printed in 1706, provides a note which highlights the classical distinction between ejus and suus. The type face makes use of the long “s” that is often confused for an “f”, but the text below reads: “Note, When the Particles [self] [selves] or [own], neither are nor may be added, then [his] is made by [ejus] [their] by [eorum]; the Genetive Case [eum] [eos] for [him] or [them].”
There are many more grammar books printed for English-speaking communities during the Early Modern period which show these distinct usages. Yet the employment of ejus for suus is ubiquitous in ownership inscriptions in books from this time. It is improbable that the owners of these books, who presumably knew Latin quite well, did not know the difference in the use of ejus and suus. Perhaps a more plausible explanation is that once a grammatically incorrect practice became widespread, it was perpetuated even though it was known to be incorrect in formal usage. It is possible that the use of a demonstrative pronoun for a reflexive became so prevalent that it was baked into the common usage of the period and was frequently reproduced.
In the medieval period, when knowledge of classical Latin grammar was not as extensive as it had become in later centuries, there was often confusion between suus and ejus. Some romance languages bear witness to this linguistic error. Consider the possessives in French son, sa, and ses. They can refer to the subject but also to a third person as in Il a perdu son chapeau “he lost his (own) hat” and J’ai perdu son chapeau “I lost his hat”. In the second example, the possessive son would be rendered as ejus in Latin since it does not refer to the subject. In French, son functions both as a reflexive possessive as in the first example and as a third person possessive in the second example. This nonreflexive use of “son” in French — which is directly descended from the Latin reflexive suus — is a testament to the uncertainty which resulted between suus and ejus in the Middle Ages. It appears that a similar ambivalence became systemic and was reproduced in book ownership inscriptions, even when the owners of these books were being schooled with grammar books that taught the distinction. In other words, “ejus liber” may have developed into a linguistic bad habit and a pervasive trend of, as Daffy Duck would put it, “pronoun trouble.”
Sources
Bramlett, Frank, “Cartoons and Pronoun Trouble” (2003). English Faculty Publications. 49.
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