![]() The argument is a case of fooling oneself with one's own terminology. In the words of Merriam-Webster's Dictionary of English Usage: For example, in the expressions "the school's headmaster", "the men's department", and "tomorrow's weather", the school does not own/possess the headmaster, men do not own/possess the department, and tomorrow does not/will not own the weather. This case was called the genitive until the 18th century and, like the genitive case in other languages, expresses relationships other than possession. The apostrophe is used in English to indicate what is, for historical reasons, misleadingly called the possessive case in the English language. Plurals not ending in -s keep the -'s marker, such as "children's toys, the men's toilet", since there was no risk of ambiguity. However, this was not universally accepted until the mid-19th century. The solution was to use an apostrophe after the plural "s" (as in "girls' dresses"). The plural genitive did not use the "-es" inflection, and since many plural forms already consisted of the "-s" or "-es" ending, using the apostrophe in place of the elisioned "e" could lead to singular and plural possessives of a given word having the exact same spelling. This was regarded as representing not the elision of the "e" in the "-e" or "-es" ending of the word being pluralized, but the elision of the "e" from the Old English genitive singular inflection "-es". By the 18th century, an apostrophe with the addition of an "s" was regularly used for all possessive singular forms, even when the letter "e" was not omitted (as in "the gate's height"). The use of elision has continued to the present day, but significant changes have been made to the possessive and plural uses. Comma's are used, Philip Luckcombe, 1771) and in the consonants s, z, ch, sh, (as in waltz's and cotillions, Washington Irving, 1804). There was formerly a respectable tradition (17th to 19th centuries) of using the apostrophe for noun plurals, especially in loanwords ending in a vowel (as in. ![]() An apostrophe followed by "s" was often used to mark a plural specifically, the Oxford Companion to the English Language notes that English spelling retained many inflections that were not pronounced as syllables, notably verb endings ("-est", "-eth", "-es", "-ed") and the noun ending "-es", which marked either plurals or possessives, also known as genitives (see Possessive apostrophe, below). ![]() Early English practice įrom the 16th century, following French practice, the apostrophe was used when a vowel letter was omitted either because of incidental elision ("I'm" for "I am") or because the letter no longer represented a sound ("lov'd" for "loved"). Modern French orthography has restored the spelling une heure. It was also frequently used in place of a final "e" (which was still pronounced at the time) when it was elided before a vowel, as in un' heure. Introduced by Geoffroy Tory (1529), the apostrophe was used in place of a vowel letter to indicate elision (as in l'heure in place of la heure). It was introduced into English in the 16th century in imitation of French practice. ![]() The apostrophe was first used by Pietro Bembo in his edition of De Aetna (1496). The word "apostrophe" comes ultimately from Greek ἡ ἀπόστροφος ( hē apóstrophos, ' turning away or elision'), through Latin and French. It is also used in a few distinctive cases for the marking of plurals, e.g.
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