Blessed Assurance, Jesus Is Mine

“Blessed assurance, Jesus is mine! Oh what a foretaste of glory divine!

Heir of salvation, purchase of God!

Born of his spirit, washed in His blood.

Chorus: This is my story, this is my song,

Praising my saviour, all the day long”- Fanny Crosby: 1873.

“Blessed assurance, Jesus is mine”. This is a popular Christian song. It says ‘Jesus is mine’ NOT ‘Jesus is my’ and certainly not ‘Jesus is for me’. A possessive pronoun is so called because it shows ownership. We have ‘mine’ (for the first person singular); ‘yours’ (for the second person singular); ‘his/hers/its’ (for the third person singular). We also have ‘ours’ (for the first person plural) ‘yours’ (for the second person plural) and ‘theirs’ (for the third person plural).

Do not confuse the possessive adjective with the possessive pronoun. One may identify the possessive adjectives in the following sentences: This is my house; This is your house; This is his house; This is her house; This is our house; This is their house. One may identify the possessive pronouns in the following sentences. This house is mine; This house is yours; This house is his; This house is hers; This house is ours; This house is theirs.

You may distinguish between “The book is mine” (I own the book) AND “The book is for me” (I am yet to receive the book). You may also distinguish between “The car is his father’s” (The car belongs to his father) AND “The car is for his father” (The car is intended to be given to his father).

It is not correct to precede possessives with an article, e.g. (WRONG): The my book is on the table. (CORRECT): My book is on the table. It is equally wrong to have other determiners preceding possessives as in “This my book is on the table.” “This my watch…”; This my table…”; “This my teacher…” are all erroneous constructions. They should rather be: “My book is on the table”. “My watch…”; “My table…”; “My teacher…”

Possessive pronouns are used to refer to a specific person/people or thing/things (the ‘antecedent’) belonging to a person/people (and sometimes belonging to an animal/animals or thing/things). These can be used as ‘subject’ or ‘object’

There are two books on the table. Mine is the bigger one (Subject – My book). Show me your pencils. Don’t take mine (object – my pencil). My trousers are dirty. Yours are neat (subject: Your trousers) I was searching for your shirts. I saw John’s shirt but I could not see yours (object: your shirt). The boys found their books but the girls could not find theirs (object: their books). Your tables are strong; ours are not so strong (subject: Our tables).

The interrogative pronoun ‘whose’ can also be a possessive pronoun, e.g. This book has lain here for a week. Whose is it? So can ‘one’. One’s house is his castle, where ‘one’s’ is used as a possession for ‘one’.

You may notice that we do not use the apostrophe s (‘s) in yours, hers, ours and its; They do not exist in English so it is wrong to write your’s, her’s, our’s, their’s, and it’s (when used as a possessive pronoun) or possessive adjective, e.g. It was wrong to have: ‘Legal and Allied congratulate the Ghana Bar Association on the occasion of it’s Annual conference during the Bar Conference in Takoradi recently.

“Give the dog its food and the cat its” In this sentence, we have employed the possessive adjective ( its food) and the possessive pronoun (its) it will be wrong to use ‘it’s’ which is the shortened form of ‘it is’ here.

We say “Best wishes to you and yours”. (i.e. your family); “The gift came from me and mine”. (i.e. my family).” Yours truly”; “Yours faithfully”; “Yours sincerely”, “Yours affectionately” are conventional endings for letters; they are NOT “Your’s truly;” “Your’s faithfully”, “Your’s sincerely”; “Your’s affectionately”.  A peep at a Guinness bottle shows “St James’s Gate, Dublin”. That is a correct way of depicting a gate named after St James. We have Marvin Harris’s Cows, Pigs, Wars and Witches: There is also The Riddles of Culture. We also have Christopher Hitchens’s article about the peculiarities of the Nobel Prize awards. So also do we have Charles’s nightmarish tales and Jones’s wealth.

Let us now look at how we state a thing possessed by Rawlings and Mills, both of whose names end in‘s’. For Rawlings, it is Rawlings’s and for Mills, it is Mills’s. It is thus appropriate to say “Mr Bensah is Rawlings’s publicity secretary”. We can also say “Do you know Atta Mills’s wife? It will thus be wrong to write Rawling’s or Mill’s story unless they call themselves Rawling and Mill respectively.

Do not be confused when a name ends in ‘s’. It is treated (for possessive case) as the name ending in any alphabet. Thus, just as we have, for example, ‘Kwame’s, Ama’s, Afua’s, John’s or Emmanuel’s day of glory’, we also have Barnabas’s, Thomas’s or Judas’s day of shame.

You may have seen “Christine Moses’s Report” on Ghana Television. It is an excellent way of presenting a report filed by Christine Moses.

There is no universally accepted code of rules governing the formation of the possessive case of names ending in ‘s’. It is only logic that dictates the addition of another‘s’ as well as an apostrophe (‘).

It would simply be right to have “In Jesus’s name, rise up and walk”. “Jesus’s parables were told to many people”.

However, it is now quite normal to write Jesus’ parables, Moses’ rod, and Dickens’ novels. Hence the Ghana Television could as well have “Christine Moses’ Report”.

Sometimes, we use the ‘of + noun’ to express possession, e.g. “In the name of Jesus, rise up and walk”. “The parables of Jesus were told to many people”.

However, the apostrophe could be used to depict possession. The apostrophe serves three useful purposes (i) to denote the possessive of names ending in‘s’ e.g. Jesus’ parables; (ii) to show that ‘s’ is forming the plural of a word not ordinarily admitting of a plural, e.g.” Mind your p’s and q’s (i.e. be careful or particular as to your words or behaviour); (iii) to go with a defining plural, e.g. “Five years’ tuition made of him a remarkable gentleman”

There is a modern tendency to omit the apostrophe where nouns are, strictly speaking, adjectival and have no possessive influence, e.g. Nurses Association, Yaa Asantewaa Girls Secondary School, Adventist Students Union, Notre Dame Girls School.

Otherwise, the above would have to be written as Nurses’s (or Nurses’) Association, Yaa Asantewaa Girls’s (or Girls’) Secondary School, Adventist Students’s (or Students’) Union, Notre Dame Girls’s (or Girls’) School.

One could say: Bophar was a friend of Tommy’s (NOT; Bophar was a friend of Tommy). This is known as ‘double possessive’. But care should be taken not to use the ‘double possessive’ for inanimate objects, e.g. The crown jewels of the United Kingdom (NOT: The Crown Jewels of United Kingdom’s)

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BY Africanus Owusu-Ansah