It is now OK in Germany to use an apostrophe to indicate the possessive:
Guidelines issued by the body regulating the use of Standard High German orthography have clarified that the use of the punctuation mark colloquially known as the Deppenapostroph (“idiot’s apostrophe”) has become so widespread that it is permissible.
The Deppenapostroph is not to be confused with the English greengrocer’s apostrophe, when an apostrophe before an ‘s’ is mistakenly used to form the plural of a noun (“a kilo of potato’s”).
Huh. I'm fine with "idiot's apostrophe" since I think the apostrophe is pointless and, indeed, idiotic. The Germans should have stuck to their guns.
But "English greengrocer’s apostrophe"? I suppose I would have called it the "roadside fruit stand apostrophe," but it amounts to the same thing. I wonder why sellers of food are such common apostrophe abusers?
most jobs held by less-educated people do not require writing stuff all the time that the mass public engages with. owning a small restaurant or grocery store is a huge exception: you constantly have to put stuff on signage or menus that other people are going to read, and usually don't have the time or resources to have someone else who actually knows how to write proofread your work or do it all for you.
Well, in my experience they're very punctilious about correct usage, like the Académie Française, and that's fine why not.
But MUCH more importantly, I don't know whether to be OUTRAGED about this because all these POLITICALLY CORRECT DEI-hire "multicultural" types, led by KAMALA HARRIS something something immigrant transgender surgery something, are DEMANDING that the Germans allow the POISONING of their language, OR because all these UNIVERSITY EELEETIST types, led by KAMALA HARRIS immigrant transgender etc., are SNEERING at ORDINARY PEOPLE who use apostrophes to pluralize nouns.
Perhaps some of the local Republicans could help me out here?
Purity and Germans can be, might be a bad thing. Let them get a bit messy. [smallest of smiles]
A bit? Oh nonono, it'll be 1930s Berlin, except with apostrophes. Oh, the huMANity...
The apostrophe is a uniquely English thing. Having said that, do they still call it the Oxford comma in Germany?
Mainly, i think, yea
Weirdly, my circa 1965 grammar book supports the use of apostrophes in forming some plurals as in the 60's, but's or t's. In fact, it says that 60's is correct but 60s is acceptable.
The correct form is "the '60s" The apostrophe stands in for the missing "19", in the same way it is used in a contraction.
As someone whose actual name has an apostrophe I am very pro correct apostrophe usage but I've become weary and jaded over the years about Americans' ability to learn how to use them. I thought we might lose them and be more like German but I guess not now.
The apostrophe pointless and idiotic? I don't know, in reading and writing it seems to me pretty useful for distinguishing between plurals and possessives. As a German learner I always thought it weird that they don't use them.
But maybe it's just that I'm so used to them.
If you're into punctuation, you should read Lynne Truss's entertaining book "Eats , Shoots and Leaves". She talks about the greengrocer's apostrophe and other such matters.
And how would you write "Lynne Truss's book" without an apostrophe, anyway?
Of course, German doesn't generally use 's' to form the plural.
Basically German only uses "s" to indicate plurals on words that it has integrated from other languages (in particular English). Right at the moment, I cannot think of a non-borrowed word in German that uses "s" as a plural. And even then, things are different. For example, German will use the word "baby" but pluralizes it as "babys", not "babies" as in English.
So we're talking only about a methodology for dealing with how to deal with "foreign" words that have been adopted in the recent past.
This rule is just a trivial little footnote in the Duden which everyone uses to verify their "Rechtschreibung"...
I adore that book. Read it a decade and a half ago and it was so much fun.
I'm not ready for life in English without apostrophes-- aux barricades!
We definitely need them to indicate possessives. Unlike German, we don't use cases enough to rely on them instead. And if their language police are willing to let people use them now, that's a stronger argument for using them in English.
The most general common offense against apostrophes is the recent fad for announcers not to pronounce some possessives. There's a difference between "Harris' campaign," without the second S, and "Harris's campaign," pronouncing it, and if you're listening and the newsreader doesn't pronounce the second S, it sounds completely ungrammatical and stupid, as well as confusing.
The practice probably derives from a stupid supposed "rule" about apostrophizing names ending in S depending on whether they had more than one syllable, blah blah blah, that never made any sense and was invented just to confuse third graders. In oral usage, possessives need to be audible where that's possible, and you indicate that in writing with apostrophe-S. S-apostrophe is for plurals.
The (mostly singular) possessive apostrophe-S originated, I believe, as a contraction of "his." If you read 16C and some 17C English, you'll often see constructions like "John his book" which could well have been elided in speech as "Johns book" and the spelling adapted to match. Regardless, I think we need the apostrophe there.
In other contractions, it's useful for separating things like "cant" and "can't" but eventually we might get lazy enough drop it anyway. Or just let spellcheck have its way here as with everything else. That might at least stop people from using apostrophe-S for plurals (which goes back a long way-- Andrew Jackson-- no greengrocer he-- used to do it quite a bit).
As for the most bumfuzzling apostrophe issue, a colleague in English had the simplest and most elegant answer: Whenever you see "it's," expand it and read it to yourself as "it is." If "it is" makes sense, you need the apostrophe. If it doesn't, you don't.
> The (mostly singular) possessive apostrophe-S originated, I believe, as a contraction of "his."
I'm no expert, so I'm not saying you are wrong, but I have heard that actually it went the other way: The "s" sound at the end of nouns to mark possessives was a holdover of a case marker in Old English. When writing became more widespread and was just starting to be standardized, some people didn't know what to do with it, so started writing it in constructions like "John his book", even though it had never been pronounced that way.
Hmm, that does sound plausible, thanks, especially with the linkage to printing orthography. Maybe time to hunt up a philologist or two.
We definitely need them to indicate possessives. Unlike German, we don't use cases enough to rely on them instead
I'm perfectly find with apostrophes. That said, I'm not sure it's true we "We definitely need them to indicate possessives." We could infer the possessive from context easily enough if that's the way the language had gone.
"Marys house" pretty clearly would indicate "the house that belongs to Mary" just as easily as "Mary's house"—I don't think lack of an apostrophe would trip many people up.
Marys clean house…
There is no rule prohibiting a singular noun ending in "s" being followed by an apostrophe s. Harris's is correct, although you have to rely on context to distinguish between "belonging to Harris" and "Harris is".
There is a rule against following a plural noun with apostrophe s. A plural noun is made possessive by following it with an apostrophe. If we are referring to something belonging to more than one Harris, then it is the Harrises', as in for instance the Harrises' home.
Agree absolutely on the plural possessives, and it seems like a plausible source of confusion about that greengrocer's plural.
On the other, though-- back in the day, there was putatively a rule that made a particular distinction between one-syllable names ending in S and others ending in S. At this distance I don't remember which went with which, but in one case you were supposed to form possessives the usual way ('s) and in the other with only the apostrophe. It would be something like Harris's, but Bass', or the other way around.
If there was ever any rational justification for this distinction it's vanished in the mists of time. It may just have been a marketing gimmick for the line of elementary-school grammar books our district used, or a hobbyhorse of the publisher's head grammarian. But I've seen other references to that supposed rule since my elementary-school days, so it was in circulation for Baby Boomers.
A well-known university town in Scotland is officially written as "St Andrews" -- no period, no apostrophe. When I inquired why there was no punctuation, I was told
a) in Britain, "Saint" is often abbreviated as "St" without a period, and
b) the town name is older than the apostrophe.
When I lived in London I spent a few years on Princes Av. Americans thought I'd left off an 's'. It drove me crazy that it didn't have an apostrophe. (The street was built in 1890.) Btw, all the greengrocers over there put apostrophes on all signage -- tomato's, strawberry's, carrot's etc. But I love a properly placed apostrophe.
Was the saint's name Andrew or Andrews? The former is typically a masculine first name while the latter is usually a surname.
Britons eschew the use of a period/full stop with abbreviations. Thus you'll see Mr instead of Mr., Mrs instead of Mrs., Dr instead of Dr., and so on. As with a lot of things, the UK usage is newer, and the American practice more traditional.
Dave Barry defined the apostrophe as a punctuation mark used by small businesses to indicate that an "s" is coming up at the end of the word.
There is apparently a trend in regional everyday German to use a construction to replace possessive case of nouns, which led a Bastian Sick to publish a series of books with the title Der Dativ ist dem Genitiv sein Tod, which could be rendered in English as ‘The Objective Case is to the Possessive Case Its Death’; itself an example of the (somewhat awkward-sounding) construction. It has also been turned into a game; I have a copy.
Greengrocers have nothing on the bodega owner I saw years ago advertising "sox's for sale."