I don't mean to make it grammatically correct I mean does English need them?
I can't seem to find a use case other than it's "legacy" in English, but that is never a reason to keep something around.
For example, would there ever be a confusion of "hell" and "he'll"? What about "theyll" or "they'll" or "he's" and "hes".
A friend brought up this use case:
Tim: "How do I get up there?"
Rodney: { "Well think." | "We'll think." }
Except that is even flawed because technically "well" in the first example needs a comma after like:
Rodney: { "Well, think." | "We'll think." }
This would clear this confusion up.
I saw killtheapostrophe.com years ago and it got me thinking and so I brought it up with my grandmother, who has a Ph. D. in linguistics, and she agrees with him, however it got brought up again on Twitter and I was curious what others who love linguistics think about it.
Best Answer
I think the arguments on that site are pretty weak.
For one, the argument that "If you can't think of an example, there mustn't be one" is very poor. A lack of imagination does not constitute a robust argument.
In addition, the writer suggests replacing the pluralising 's' with a 'z', to get over the problem of singular and plural possessives. So, he's asking us to ditch the apostrophe and change pluralisation.
On top of that, the rationale for removing them are spurious at best:
Sure, sure, this is all pretty subjective. However, the very argument for removing apostrophes given on that site is riddled with straw men and subjective viewpoints.
In the absence of compelling reasons to remove the apostrophe, "legacy" becomes a very compelling reason to keep them.