Sesquiotica

So which is it: Harris’ or Harris’s? Neither: it’s τῆς Χάρεως. Or maybe Harro. Or, hmm…

There has been some confusion and consternation lately about the possessive form of the surname of the vice president of the USA, who is also the Democratic candidate for the presidency. Many people, remembering what they were taught in school,* insist it must be Harris’. For the record, if you are adhering to the Associated Press style, that is correct in the singular; if you are adhering to any other major guide (as most people do), the singular possessive is Harris’s. The plural possessive, according to every authority, is Harrises’. But I want to talk about what this paradigm manifests in particular about modern English. And I want to have some fun.

The thing about modern English is that we view proper nouns (names that get capital letters) as internally unassailable. The only alterations they can have are additions of apostrophes and s or es for possessives and plurals and plural possessives. We make jokes, sure, for instance calling the Winklevoss twins “the Winklevii,”^† but that just manifests the other thing we do: treat plurals as the one signifier for non-English-origin common nouns. We know that the “proper” plural of radius, for instance, is radii. If a word has been borrowed into English, a certain kind of person will make a point of using a plural from the original language: “Oh, no, you don’t mean inukshuks. You mean inukshuit.” (This also leads to silly mistakes like octopi.) And that’s it. We have no concept of any other possible alteration to a noun.

But speakers of many other languages do. It’s common enough among languages to have changes to nouns, not just common nouns but proper nouns, to indicate not just plural and possessive (called “genitive” by linguists and philologists) but also nominative versus accusative (we do this with pronouns: he versus him, for instance) and even dative (indirect object) and ablative (the reverse of dative: taking away rather than giving) – and, in some languages, a lot more. Linguists generally call these various noun forms “inflections” (the noun equivalent of conjugations, which are what verbs do).

For fun, I worked out what the full inflectional paradigm would be for Harris if it were a Latin noun. When speaking of Latin, one typically calls this “declension”; you say this is how Harris is declined, because of the image of going down a list of forms on paper (not because of students saying “I prefer not to,” though that surely has happened). And as it happens, Harris in form looks like a noun of the third declension in Latin. So here’s how that goes (note that I’m listing the cases in the order linguists list them in, which is different from the order students of Latin learned to recite them in school):

nominative singular Harris
accusative singular Harrem
genitive singular Harris
dative singular Harrī
ablative singular Harre

nominative plural Harrēs
accusative plural Harrēs
genitive plural Harrium
dative plural Harribus
ablative plural Harribus

Meaning that instead of Harris’s you would write Harris; instead of Harrises’ you would write Harrium; and, for that matter, instead of to the Harrises you would write Harribus (Latin doesn’t use definite articles as English does). And if Harris is not the subject but the direct object, it’s Harrem. (The vocative form, which you use when addressing the person, is in this case the same as the nominative. Note also that the macrons on ī and ē indicating long vowels are a modern scholarly device; they wrote long and short identically in ancient Rome.)

I posted this on Bluesky (which is a site you can go to now instead of Twitter) and it got some responses, including how it would be in Finnish – due to length limitations on posts, @uimonen.bsky.social provided just most of the singulars:

nominative Harris
genitive Harriksen
accusative (i.e., partitive) Harrista
inessive Harriksessa
illative Harrikseen
elative Harriksesta
adessive Harriksella
allative Harrikselle
ablative Harrikselta
essive Harriksena
translative Harrikseksi
abessive Harriksetta
comitative Harriksineni

A thing to think about here is that whereas the Latin declension is really for humour, the Finnish inflectional paradigm could actually be used by actual speakers today in Finland (though when I look at the Finnish Wikipedia article on her, for instance, the paradigm is different: the genitive is Harrisista, for instance. Why? Well, it’s not a Finnish name, for one thing, and, as we will see, that tends to matter). There are no modern daily speakers of Latin, and most descendants of Latin – French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese – have declined to keep the declensions. 

But another classical language is spoken today: Greek. Here’s the Classical Greek inflectional paradigm for Χάρις, which is how Harris is rendered in modern Greek and might as well be in the ancient kind as well – I’ve assumed the same third declension as for πόλῐς (polis, ‘city’), and feminine gender (the inflection would be different for a man named Χάρις); note also that it’s normal with Greek to include the definite article, which is used far more even than in English:

nominative singular ἡ Χάρῐς (hē Haris)
accusative singular τὴν Χάρῐν (tḕn Harin)
genitive singular τῆς Χάρεως (tês Hareōs)
dative singular τῇ Χάρει (têi Harei)
vocative singular Χάρῐ (Hari)

nominative dual τὼ Χάρει (tṑ Harei)
accusative dual τὼ Χάρει (tṑ Harei)
genitive dual τοῖν Χάρέοιν (toîn Hareoin)
dative dual τοῖν Χάρέοιν (toîn Hareoin)
vocative dual Χάρει (Harei)

nominative plural αἱ Χάρεις (hai Hareis)
accusative plural τᾱ̀ς Χάρεις (tā̀s Hareis)
genitive plural τῶν Χάρεων (tôn Hareōn)
dative plural ταῖς Χάρεσῐ/ταῖς Χάρεσῐν (taîs Haresi/taîs Haresin)
vocative plural Χάρεις (Hareis)

Yes, that’s right: there’s also the dual – which is nice if you’re referring to the Harrises as a couple (except, of course, Kamala Harris’s husband is Doug Emhoff, so never mind). So the family of Harrises, set in English, would, going by this, be not Harrii or Harroi or whatever but Hareis. And so on.

So does this work in modern Greek? Ah, well, I’m sorry to tell you that, while Modern Greek has declensions (just a little simpler than the classical ones), names from other languages are treated as indeclinable. So when you look at articles about Kamala Harris, it’s always Χάρις. Sorry.

But there are other languages that also decline names. Most, however, decline to do so for foreign names – after all, even if the name looks like a word from their language, they know it’s not. Lithuanian names, for instance, tend to end in -is in the nominative masculine, and replace that for different noun cases; Vytautas Landsbergis, for instance, when he is the indirect object (dative case) rather than the subject of a verb, is Vytautui Landsbergiui. And for “Landsbergis’s” it’s Landsbergo. But Harris isn’t a Lithuanian name, and what’s more, Kamala Harris is not a man and so wouldn’t be inflected according to the masculine paradigm.

On the other hand, Lithuania’s neighbours in Latvia have an answer to that. Latvian makes the nominative of her name Harisa, because Latvian feminine names and in -a as a rule, and because rr isn’t a thing in Latvian (you will also see Herisa, but there’s a stronger case for Harisa). And so if she’s the direct object, she’s Harisu; the indirect object, Harisai; and the possessive for her name is Harisas.

This is all lots of fun, of course, but Harris is, in truth, an English name. But we don’t have to leave England to find a full inflecting paradigm for it. We can just go back in time – Old English had a full system of inflections. The Old English inflections for her name would be:

nom sg Harris
acc sg Harris
gen sg Harrises
dat sg Harrise

nom pl Harrisas
acc pl Harrisas
gen pl Harrisa
dat pl Harrisum

So if you give a book to the Harrises, “þu giefst þa boc þam Harrisum” (for those who don’t know, þ is how we used to write the sound we now write as th). 

That’s not nearly as entertaining as treating the -is as a suffix, alas. But it also has two problems: first, the name Harris only appeared in Middle English, so inflecting it Old English style is as contrived as declining it Latin style; second, in Middle English, the name actually does contain a suffix: Harris is the genitive form of Harry. Names formed from genitives are quite common in English, since the genitive used to be used more broadly: if you lived near the field, you were called Fields; by the brook, Brooks; if you were of the family of Stephen, you were Stephens; and if of the family of Harry, you were Harris. And yes, Harry is a nickname for Henry, but so it goes. Toms and Jacks are also family names.

But you can see the problem here: How can you have the genitive of a name that is already in the genitive? Along with which is the fact that it’s Middle English, not Old English. In Middle English, the inflections of Harry would be (with spelling variations):

nom sg Harry
acc sg Harry
gen sg Harris
dat sg Harre

nom pl Harres
acc pl Harres
gen pl Harre/Harrene
dat pl Harre/Harres

But that just means that if there’s a Harry and another Harry and they jointly have something, then it’s Harre thing or Harrene thing. If it’s the thing of the family of Harry, you can’t really do a double genitive unless you treat the first one as just part of the name: Harrisis in the singular and Harrise or Harrisene in the plural. 

It does remind us of one key fact, though: the genitive (possessive) in English didn’t have an apostrophe until just a few centuries ago, when the apostrophe was added on the basis of the mistaken supposition that the possessive was a contraction (imagining “Harry’s book” as short for “Harry his book”). That’s right: this detail that confuses so many people, and that provokes the ire of a certain set, is founded on nothing other than a historically baseless reinterpretation.

Mind you, a Latin inflectional paradigm that gives us Harrium librī for “the Harrises’ books” is also a historically baseless reinterpretation. But at least we know that. And it’s fun, and no one is getting upset.

…

* First: High-school teachers are not subject matter experts. Not even high-school English teachers. Not even the ones who “beat it into you.” Second, many people do not accurately remember what their teachers tried to teach them.

^† Which is truly over the top, because even if it were Winklevus it would just be Winklevi – the -ii ending is only for plurals of -ius nouns – and it’s not, it’s not even Winklevos, which would pluralize to Winklevoi. But, yes, the point is it’s a joke, so it goes to the lengths of caricature.