Gordon I don't know about old wills (which is what you asked) but in many of our old letters they often have an apostrophe before the 'd' at the end of the word, and it seems pointless to me, as if you put in an apostrophe, you may as well have put in an 'e' - things like dress'd, imagin'd So I don't know if this is a regular thing, or just an idiosincrasy on the part of the letter writer. Eunice in Queensland

> Gordon > I don't know about old wills (which is what you asked) but in many of our > old letters they often have an apostrophe before the 'd' at the end of the > word, and it seems pointless to me, as if you put in an apostrophe, you may > as well have put in an 'e' - things like dress'd, imagin'd > So I don't know if this is a regular thing, or just an idiosincrasy on the > part of the letter writer. > Eunice in Queensland > I meant to enquire about the practice of putting an apostrophe before a -t-, not before a -d-. I've always assumed that the relatively common practice of writing -'d instead of -ed reflected the writer's preference to pronounce the word as a single syllable (e.g. learnd) rather than a double syllable (learn-ed). There may be no way of proving that, though learned (two syllables, there!) opinions may exist to support the view. But I hadn't encountered any 't forms before. Here is a response from my posting to another List. "See Richard Crashaw's Hymn of the Nativity, from Metaphysical Lyrics & Poems of the 17th C., at http://www.bartleby.com/105/101.html. There you'll find not only 'mean't' and 'dream't', but also 'kis't', 'show'd', 'shew'd', and 'look't'. This suggests a) that the '-t' ending of the past participle was then used in words that we now spell '-ed', and also b) that the apostrophe was used for the '-d' endings as well. " Gordon