Lincoln’s letter reveals grammatical error: Report

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 “its greater numbers,” which calls for the possessive pronoun “its,” rather than “its,” a word more commonly read as a contraction for “it is”,according to the daily.

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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.