Neil Coffey wrote:
I have a feeling it's more the other way round: if those attempting to define the "standard" for apostrophe use had come up with something more sensible and logical in the first place, then people might have been more inclined and naturally able to follow it. Instead, we insist on continuing with a standard that has been a mess of illogicality all along. Why on earth do we insist of this bizarre sadistic etiquette where the apostrophe marks possession and it is a major faux pas to omit it, while at the same time advancing the notion that it is also a major faux pas to write "it's" instead of "its" with the meaning of "of it". Why is it a major faux pas to write "who's" rather than "whose"? Why is it a major faux pas to write "would've" rather than "would have"? Indeed, why have the same piece of punctuation to denote 3 separate things: (1) missing phonetic material currently perceived of as 'missing' or 'abbreviated' by native speakers, (2) phonetic material historically created by a shortening but not simply perceived as a different word by native speakers, and (3) possession? -- are we really unimaginitive enough not to be able to invent dinstinct means of marking these different phenomena? And where is the study showing that they really need marking in the first place?
I write would’ve myself :-/ … of course not in formal writing…
Point taken. Perhaps it’s all unnecessary, but I still feel some sort of marking would facilitate telling the computer that it’s an ending that should not be capitalized, and that’s what I meant when I said it’s “way ahead of its times”.
Perhaps we should adopt the Finnish way of marking endings added to words that are not “normal” with a colon.
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