I’m pretty sure they are completely unnecessary, and an unnecessary expense.
My logic is pretty simple:
They contribute no sound, and thus are completely ignored in oral communicaiton.
What is writing other than putting orgal communication down on paper?
They show former spellings for words that have moved on from older forms. But all of our other words also are modified from earlier forms, and they do just fine without the marks.
The “potential for confusion” is alway exaggerated, in fact is usually operating the wrong way around - you know what is meant before you recognize the spelling error. If the apostrophe were eliminated, a whole class of spelling errors would vanish.
It’s taught in every grade, to every student, so there is an appreciable cost involved.
. . .I really don’t think that the cost of teaching children the rules of apostrophes is all that costly, considering that the young’uns are going to be in English class no matter what grammar rules there are.
Besides, literature up until this point has been written with apostrophes in full use. In order to read great literature–or, hell, even The Baby-Sitter’s Club*–one needs to know what the little curly marks above the letters mean.
*[sub]Of course, IMHO, it should be Baby-Sitters’ Club, 'cause, I mean, there were more characters and members than just Kristy. . .[/sub]
I suppose I could live without apostrophes but I don’t really see why I should have to. They’ve evolved because they’re useful. They can differentiate styles of written communication (e.g. formal v informal). They allow indication of the possessive without having to resort to the constant use of the preposition “of”. Rather than abolish them I’d be more inclined to suggest that school curricula return to teaching the correct use of apostrophes.
There are plenty of English words with identical spellings and entirely different meanings, including dove, lead, wind, wound, tear, etc. If we’re going to overhaul the entire language, we should take this into account, otherwise the OP makes good sense to me, and I think we can deal with “wont” and “cant” – the non-apostrophized forms of which aren’t used that much anyway. If we’re really getting rid of apostrophes, we might want to return to the way Spanish (and I assume most other Latin-based languages) show possessives: with the word “of.”
Well, technically, I could breathe without them, and my heart would still beat, and I would probably remain concious, but darn it, I like 'em.
Now you wanna talk extraneous punctuation, let’s get rid of the exclamation point. The adverb of punctuation, IMHO, used only by people who have difficulty expressing themselves and teenage girls.
To my knowledge, Norwegian gets by without apostrophes for the possesive case, expect is certain rare cases. I don’t see why English couldn’t do the same.
It’s so rare that people consider what’s already been done elsewhere.
Techie’s call it NIH, Not Invented Here, which is why Microsoft won’t even consider features others have until they become defacto standards.
I think that Chinese and Asian languages also are able to do without the final s on plurals. And they’ve gotten along for centuries.
