Learn English – Are apostrophes actually needed

apostrophegrammarpunctuation

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:

  1. Redundant: Hardly makes the case for this, as noted above
  2. Costly: The idea that apostrophes makes up a considerable amount of a proof-reader's effort is bogus.
  3. Snobbery: Removing the apostrophe will hardly bring about a revolution in attitudes. Snobs don't need tools to be snobs.
  4. Text messaging: Citing the mores of txtspk as justification for eradicating a punctuation mark? Let's lose those pesky vowels, too, eh? Hell, Hawaii makes do with just 13 letters (if you include the 'okina (hello apostrophe!))
  5. Impeding communication: I can't speak generally to this, but I've never come across a situation where the presence of an apostrophe has made it difficult to understand something. Nor have I struggled to express myself when faced with a potential apostrophe hole
  6. Distraction: If the presence of misplaced apostrophes drives you to distraction, you probably have bigger issues to deal with than misplaced apostrophes.

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.

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