Ammon : Yes. Mignon : Grammarians were arguing about a lot of thing then, right? Ammon : They were fighting about the color of their socks back then.
Anything they could get a fight out of they would grab, and none of them agreed with each other. People were writing entire books just attacking their predecessors position on what to do with the genitive apostrophe and a singular noun. Mignon : Even today the apostrophe is in flux. You talk about how writing decades has changed. Ammon : Right. Set me straight. Ammon : If anybody does correct you on how you use your apostrophes, you can turn around and correct them on how they pronounce it.
The first edition of the OED had a peevish and querulous editorial note, one of the very few that they have in that dictionary, under apostrophe , where the editor, James Murray, said that it should be pronounced as the French pronounce it—three syllables with the emphasis on the final syllable.
It really should! For MacKenzie, rather than pondering whether we, as a society, should be sticklers for maintaining the rules around apostrophes, the question is more: "should we adhere to the arbitrary standards that have been set down now? Even within what is generally considered to be the 'correct' usage of apostrophes, there can be some variation according to personal preference.
For example, 'James' car is red' is correct, but so is 'James's car is red'. There is some debate and ambiguity over whether, if the possessor is a singular noun that happens to end in an -s, an apostrophe should simply be added to the end, or whether an apostrophe and an additional 's' is needed. The University of Bristol's English department style guide recommends that proper nouns that end in -s form their possessive form by adding — 's.
Whereas the BBC Style Guide advises that for names, the possessive 's should be used whenever possible, but that you also should be guided by how the last syllable of the name is pronounced, and omit the extra s in certain cases.
It appears that both approaches are acceptable, and that there is a degree of personal preference. Probably the best rule of thumbs is, whichever you decide to use, make sure you are consistent. Or with numbers, when referring to a particular decade, some would write 'the s' and others 'the 's'. No wonder it can get confusing for someone who might not have been taught the minutiae. So who are the arbiters of what's right and wrong when it comes to apostrophes?
In early life, they are English language teachers, following a set curriculum. Like many linguists, MacKenzie explains that she started out as a "raving prescriptivist", who was militant about punctuation rules, but in time she learned the extent to which these can serve as gate-keeping mechanisms and remove opportunities for some. Linguists aren't grammarians, but rather study how language is used in the real world, she says.
We're here to tell people what they're doing is great. Publications such as The New York Times serve to arbiter what is wrong or right when it comes to apostrophes and other grammatical usage Credit: Alamy.
So does she see it as problematic, if the apostrophe is not just supposedly misused, but in its dying days? Most grammarians by this time felt that the genitive singular apostrophe had an historical justification: it was regarded as a mark of elision representing sounds which had, in the earlier stages of English, been present and pronounced.
Actually, neither explanation is entirely satisfactory, but both served the necessary function of justifying the presence of the apostrophe in genitive singular constructions and thus hastened its acceptance by grammarians.
If they disputed exactly what sounds were elided, they were in accord on the most important particular: something was missing and the apostrophe quite properly took its place. A footnote on the bottom of the same page continues: The proposition that the retrenched sound represented by the apostrophe is the e from the old es genitive affix is attractive in its simplicity, but historically improbable.
In the first place, over two hundred years had elapsed between the disappearance of the inflectional e and regular use of the apostrophe as a genitive marker; that is, the apostrophe would have to represent a sound heard by no speaker and a letter seen by few.
More important is the fact that the nominative plural affix, which was identical to the genitive singular in late Middle English, did not evolve in any systematic way into an apostrophic construction.
It is more likely that the presence of the apostrophe is in some way accounted for by the his-genitive construction, which chronologically preceded the advent of the possessive apostrophe; but as Den Breejen shows, the pronomial genitive construction was rather limited in distribution—it was by no means the only, or even the most common, means of expressing the genitive relationship.
For a discussion of the evolution of the his -genitive construction, see H. Fisher Unwin, Ltd. This is a major problem with Wikipedia. When it cites actual scholarly sources, they are often unavailable for checking on the Internet. It's the moon. And from this figure of speech, this is where we get the idea that an apostrophe represents something that is missing. That's how we come to get its main use, to represent that something, that it's standing in for absent letters, just like an apostrophe in rhetoric would be delivered to absent friends.
Follow me over to the next screen. Let's do a little bit of history. So the apostrophe was introduced to the French language by an engraver and humanist named Geoffroy Tory, I think, is how you would say his name. That's a guess. And around the late 16th century, I think it's around the s, Tory is the man who also introduced a lot of diacritic or accent marks into French. So, you know, instead of like, "aime" meaning "loved," it would be "aime" like that. And he's the person that used it originally in French to start representing eliminated letters.
So if you have an expression like "la heure," meaning "the hour," Tory would have it "l'heure," like that. You know, and this apostrophe in there, boom, represents this missing vowel sound. So, okay, so it's around this time that this apostrophe starts making its way into English, because remember, England has been under French rule for centuries at this point.
The French invaded in the 11th century. We're talking about the Norman Conquest of And since then, French culture has had a very profound impact on the island of Great Britain.
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