Re: English plurals and possessives

"Scott W. Hlad" wrote:
> Thank you Daniel, for writing that out. The above should be engraved in
> concrete on the lintel of every door of every school in the English speaking
> world. This has been totally lost to the person on the street. I also
> despise seeing 's used to indicate a plural. How many times have you seen
> the following sign on a door in a store:
>
> Employee's only
It's a lost battle.  I even find myself doing it sometimes, tho I
usually catch myself and fix it.  It's a shame, because it eliminates
the one genuinely useful use of the apostrophe.  But, 's = plural does
still irritate me.  Perhaps the whole apostrophe-possession convention
will be dropped, so that, like pronunciation, we'll write "boys",
"boy's" and "boys'" the same.

On the other hand, in a future English I once worked on, where the
morphological genitive was lost, apostrophe was still used for
possession.  For example "The boy' hat" = ModEng "The boy's hat", plural
possession being written the same as today, "The boys' hat".

--
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