For contractions, use the traditional apostrophe: can’t, don’t, won’t. I’ll call this the “right apostrophe”. It shows up on my keyboard as a single quote, or the lower case of the double quote.
For possessive, use what I call the “left apostrophe”. It is on my keyboard to the left of “1”, as a lower case of the “~”. Bobs, Sues, also roll in first and second person, etc., hers, theirs.
Problem solved! I think I will teach this to my children, and instruct them to correct any teacher who does not use this method. That will be fun!
Around here, actually, I have heard in informal speech, if there is ambiguity, to add an extra syllable, like “brotherses boat,” to make it clear you’re making a possessive out of the plural “brothers” as opposed to the singular “brother.” No doubt some will think that is making a travesty/mockery of the English language, but it does the job.
Nothing inherently wrong with people who don’t use the Oxford comma, but I’m still putting them on my list. For what purpose? They’ll find out.
Grave. Pronounced either like the cemetery feature, or like graahv. That’s a pretty useless symbol as an accent mark in some languages like French and sometimes Italian it doesn’t do anything except look cool and sometimes differentiate words, like ou vs. où.
Do we want to make English spellings more consistent with pronunciation? Get ready to write a new ABC song, because we’ll need 18 more letters in our alphabet so that there is one symbol for each sound. Then we’ll need to retrain every literate user of English. And then the books and the computers…
Can’t speak for Magnetout but he was responding to me -
The point I was making is not that we need to replace all of english spelling and syntax with something better. (Esperanto, presumably.) It’s that it’s really odd to get bothered by the single specific confusion relating to apostrophes and pluralization. Especially since it’s only problematic if people screw up and do it wrong - and seriously, it’s not that hard to get right.
Me, I’d rather fix something that’s objectively wrong, like the fact that when I’m quoting 'This sucks." in a sentence I have to write it as “This sucks,” or worse, “This sucks!”
Then you’d better get used to eating heese and hokolate. Doesn’t sound as good, does it?
I like what they’ve done in Malay and Indonesian: since the letter c is only needed for that one phoneme (they simply use k and s for /k/ and /s/), they drop the useless h and write e.g. cakra for chakra. This is also true of standardized transliterations of Sanskrit and other Indic languages, which is probably where they got the idea.
Turkish did an interesting thing with that. They have an i, which in capital is İ. Basically a long “I” sound in English. They also have I/ı which isn’t really a sound in English. Except apparently in California, NZ, and SA. I don’t know if I’ve been saying “goose” funny all this time or not?
It sounds like OP wants to get rid of the regular English genitive suffix 's, specifically. That doesn’t require tossin’ the apostrophe completely, so why is OP framin’ it that way?
Some contractions that need apostrophes to be read correctly:
*
I’ll
we’ll
he’ll
she’ll
we’re
*
And some more that mean very different things without 'em:
*
let’s
who’re
'tain’t
*
That was mostly ivst for plaqves and inscriptions. Bvt they reiected two crvcial letters in the alphabet, resvlting in a rather iarring appearance to their texts.
But Hebrew does use one of its consonantal letters, aleph, when a word starts with a vowel, which would make reading your ’bv txt ’sr. Hbrw also uses certain consonants to spell out semivowels, some long vowels, and vowels at the end of a word. ’t ’sn’t ’s svrly rstrctd ’s yr ’xmpl sggsts. Their spelling of at least some vowels is a big help to reading.
