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English spelling is so fucked up. Possessives normally have the apostrophe, except the possessive pronouns. Just because.
by amanaplanacanal 5y ago
English spelling is so fucked up. Possessives normally have the apostrophe, except the possessive pronouns. Just because.
- disillusioned 5y agowont-fix
- spartanatreyu 5y agowont-fix or won't-fix?
- cercatrova 5y agoMore like won\'t-fix
- Biganon 5y agoSee also "whose", because "who's" would have made too much sense I guess
- spijdar 5y agoWell, for a period of time in "middle english", it was spelled "whos". Ultimately derived from the genitive singular form of Old English hwa, "hwaes". In OE the -es suffix marked the genitive case in strong masculine nouns. Eventually, the form become generalized across all nouns, with -es being applied to any noun to indicate possession. In most cases, the e is silent, and typographers began to either omit it (e.g. "whos") or, eventually, replaced it with an apostrophe, as the French did. And I suppose "whose" gained an e to indicate the "long vowel". So we've ended up in a situation where we've basically lost noun declension and just attach suffixes to indicate plurality and possession (s and 's), but our pronouns have inherited their old declensions, without the -es/-'s suffix attached. Granted, "its" is itself a semi-recent invention, as OE and middle english used "his" for both masculine and neuter third person singular genitive pronouns.
- dehrmann 5y agoNot "just because." Pronouns are still effectively declined.
- mkl 5y agoExcept "one's", because every exception must have an exception (except the ones that don't). https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/one#Pronoun https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/one#Pronoun
- Dylan16807 5y agoAvoiding overlap with contractions isn't "just because".
- skydhash 5y agoPossessives were the weird ones for me. I learned French at an early age, and you were just expected to learn the possessive pronouns. I did the same for English and while `it's` and `its` are similar, I've always considered the latter as its own thing, not something extrapolated from using the apostrophe as a possessive in English.