New York: A letter written by Abraham Lincoln has grammatical errors, modern-day readers have pointed out when they were given a chance to inspect it.
More than 100 readers pointed out questions of grammar, punctuation, usage and style in a letter written by Lincoln after the Gettysburg Address and before his second inaugural speech, `The New York Times` reported.
Many readers found fault with Lincoln`s seeming failure (the handwriting is smudgy) to insert an apostrophe in the word ‘nations’ to signal the possessive case, and with his inclusion of an apostrophe in the phrase "it’s greater numbers”, which calls for the possessive pronoun "its”, rather than "it’s”, a word more commonly read as a contraction for "it is", according to the daily.
A grammar expert, Patricia T O`Conner, pointed out that punctuation rules have changed over the past 300 years.
"Although this is a clear error in our day, it wasn`t always so. The possessive of `it` was originally `it`s’. And that was the most common form in print in the 17th and 18th centuries," Conner told the daily.
"The writings of Thomas Jefferson, Adam Smith and Jane Austen all have examples of the possessive `it`s.` But by the time Lincoln wrote that letter, the unapostrophised `its` was the predominant form. So yes, Lincoln was a bit behind the times on this one," she added, noting that distinction between `that` and `which` is largely a late 19th and early 20th century invention.
Some readers thought the phrase "I would utter nothing which" ought to be "I would utter nothing that”, Harold Holzer, a leading authority on Lincoln, told NYT. "Lincoln was not the best speller in the world."
Holzer described that the president wrote 10 letters a day without the aid of secretaries, and how he struggled with words like "inaugural" and "shadow”, which he gave an extra
"d."
"If President Abraham Lincoln had a spell checker, he never would have written the Gettysburg Address," he said.
PTI
