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Reply to "PSA: plural words don’t have apostrophes"
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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I'm now wondering when and how the possessive apostrophe got started to begin with. I know that 250 years ago there was much less consistency in how people wrote things, even those who were well educated. [/quote] Most other languages have helper words or suffixes for possession. The English system is somewhat unusual. According to Wikipedia, it mirrors the French elison which is used to prevent an awkward double vowel sound. English writers copied the form, but used it for plural and possessive. From the pack of lies: [quote]By the 18th century, an apostrophe with the addition of an ⟨s⟩ was regularly used for all possessive singular forms, even when the letter ⟨e⟩ was not omitted (as in "the gate's height"). This was regarded as representing not the elision of the ⟨e⟩ in the "-e" or "-es" ending of the word being pluralized, but the elision of the ⟨e⟩ from the Old English genitive singular inflection "-es".[/quote][/quote]
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