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Well, if you want to be a pedant, it should arguably be Bayes's theorem: https://www.bartleby.com/141/strunk.html https://www.bartleby.com/141/strunk.html. Tha
by BlackFly 7y ago
Well, if you want to be a pedant, it should arguably be Bayes's theorem: https://www.bartleby.com/141/strunk.html https://www.bartleby.com/141/strunk.html.
That "Drop the trailing s to form possessives" exception needs to die.
- WhompingWindows 7y agoWhy does it need to die? What is the rationale behind that?
- cwilkes 7y agoWhat’s the rationale for keeping it? English should try to be at least a little bit easier parse for a newbie.
- darkpuma 7y agoOne man trying to dictate the direction of a language used by a billion people... that's just not going to happen. Not that I don't sympathize. I think that "it's" should be the possessive form of 'it', not a contraction of 'it is'. Maybe if we band together we can force-feed both our changes at once to the rest of the world?
- BoorishBoor 7y agoI'm sure you also write "hi's" and "her's" because, if not, you are advocating for making English more irregular and not less.
- cameronbrown 7y agoLanguages by definition are fluid. If a certain way of spelling a word or grammatical structure spreads to become popular (possibly, yes, from one person), then it becomes the new normal.
- darkpuma 7y agoEnglish is fluid like the tides are fluid. The chance that somebody can dictate the direction of that tide is very slim.
- buckminster 7y agoBecause it reflects a misunderstanding. People say "Boris's bike" not "Boris' bike". They typically omit the possessive s when they mistake the existing s for a possessive. Like in Bayes.
- BlackFly 7y agoIf you read the article, you will find out that you are only supposed to use the exception on historical names. Most people use it incorrectly and drop the trailing s any time the word ends in an s. Arguably for Bayes, he is historical enough that it could be appropriate, but that makes the rule even worse: at what point in time does a personality become historical enough that you must drop the s? I personally consider "historical" to mean: about the time of Archimedes, when a lot of people's names seemed to end in s. In my opinion it is just better to keep the s as that matches how people will pronounce it and regularization of the language is better. Plus the misuse of the rule makes it even worse.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- 13415 7y agoWell, to be even more pedantic, there is a rule for leaving out the final s. You leave it out in possessives built from names of famous historical personalities and mythical creatures: Socrates' dialogues, Zeus' wife, Pegasus' wings, Jesus' teachings. In every other case you have to add the s: Bayes's Theorem, Jones's wife. At least that's how I've learned it as a non-native speaker.
- sweeneyrod 7y agoI think Bayes counts as a famous historical personality.