Re: OT: Silent last letters, pluralization, and possessive formation in English (was Re: Langmaker down since January?)

Eric Christopherson wrote:
> On Jun 9, 2008, at 11:42 AM, Mark J. Reed wrote:
>
>> On Mon, Jun 9, 2008 at 12:29 PM, Benct Philip Jonsson
>> <bpj@...> wrote:
>>> Hiatus is a fourth declension noun
>>> in Latin.  Its English plural is _hiatuses_.
>>> (why not hiatus-hiatus when series-series?)
>> IME, English speakers, as a rule, dislike invariant plurals, and the
>> direction of language change is toward having fewer of them.  The word
>> "serieses" already gets 55k Ghits...
>>
>> And then there's "chassis", whose pronunciation changes in the plural
>> even though the spelling doesn't...  gaaah.
>
> I think I had wondered about that, but never actually looked it up.
Another example is "corps corps" /ko: ko:z/.

> Somewhat relatedly, the spelling <debuted> annoys me. For some reason
> it's ok to me to have silent consonants at the ends of words, but not
> right between vowels. (OTOH, I used to read <buffeted> as /bV"feid/ :))
From my perspective I think I've worked out, like most reasonably well
educated people I've met, that there's no point in trying to work out
the rules to English spelling (people say "I don't know how the word's
pronounced but it's spelt ..." more often than any healthy alphabetic
orthography would permit).

In any case I read "debuted" as "debut+ed" so I never see the silent
letter between two vowels.

> Also, I've wondered before about the possessive forms of Arkansas and
> Illinois -- do you use <-s's> or <-s'>? (From Googling, I see that
> Arkansas passed a resolution last year endorsing <Arkansas's>,
> overturning a law from 1881; and that <Illinois's> is likewise used.
>
> Now imagine that there are two states with <Illinois> or <Arkansas>
> in their names, like the Dakotas or the Carolinas, and you wanted to
> spell the plural possessive of one of them. Would you write <the
> Illinois'> or <the Illinoiss'>?
If it were me, I would spell the plural of "Illinois" as "Illinoises",
certainly not as "Illinoiss", and therefore the possessive plural as
"Illinoises'". Of course the rule seems sillily to be you don't add an
orthographic s if there's a silent one there already, so I'd presume
"Illinois'". That does, however, leave much to be desired.

> I see that the Wikipedia entry for [[Apostrophe]] says:
>
> "For possessive plurals of words ending in silent x, z, or s, the few
> authorities that address the issue at all call for an added s, and
> require that the apostrophe precede the s: The Loucheux's homeland is
> in the Yukon; Compare the two Dumas's literary achievements. As usual
> in punctuation, the best advice is to respect soundly established
> practice, and beyond that to strive for simplicity, logic, and
> especially consistency."
The inclusion of "silent x" there seems to imply that it is possible to
spell "box's" as "box'", which of course it isn't. The
apostrophe-for-possession rule only applies, to my knowledge, to plurals
and particular names, generally biblical or classical.

Wikipedia uses "Descartes'" for Rene Descartes + 's.

Incidentally apparently the whole England orthography kerfuffle costs
over a hundred million pounds per year in England alone. (See the post
dated 10 June 2008: <http://www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/wells/blog.htm>.) I
suspect the scary large but short-term cost to fix it all would be much
better value...

--
Tristan.

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