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The thing is, I'm not a native speaker; it's not really something I struggled with when I learned English. I believe the general rules I learned were: plural &
by Shenglong 15y ago
The thing is, I'm not a native speaker; it's not really something I struggled with when I learned English. I believe the general rules I learned were:
plural & no possession: no apostrophe
singular, possession & name doesn't end with s: 's
singular, possession & name ends with s: '
plural, possession & name doesn't end with s: s'
- cpeterso 15y agoI'm a native English speaker and my name ends in 's', yet even I waffle about whether I just use an apostrophe. I generally include an apostrophe just for consistency. My heuristic is: if I would pronounce the extra sound, then include the apostrophe. Unfortunately, this would not help non-native speakers.. <:)
- sp332 15y agoWe can say that Shenglong's rules are "English", and then whatever you do in real life is your "dialect".
- ZeroGravitas 15y agoAnd yet if you try to trace back why those "rules" have any authority and you're likely to end-up back at a claim that it was what everyone did in their real life.
- sp332 15y agoThe rules have the authority we give them. Either we give up on having an English language that we can agree on, or we have arbitrary rules.