What style guides prefer the use of Jones’s rather than Jones’? Which version is preferred by more publications than the other?
Strunk and White. The point is that s’ indicates plural possessive, and “Jones” is singular. Most other style guides agree.
Although Strunk and White make an exception for “the possessive of ancient proper names in -es and -is, [and] the possessive Jesus’.”
I remember Homer royally concatenating s’s and z’s talking about something belonging to the whole of Ned Flanders’s family (a plural in his mind, naturally enough, even though Homer isn’t a Brit).
Couldn’t find the clip on the web, but he does show up in this handout on OP from St. Lawrence University.
ETA: I see now that OP is on the consensus or not among style guides, not “the answer” by one or another. FTR, the NYTimes guide is as above.
If that is Steve Jones’s cat, then it’s " s’s".
But what if the cat is the pet of an entire family?
If that is the Jones’ cat, then it’s " es’ " Because in this case there is more than one person named Jones.
The " s’ " combination is used when you would otherwise have three "s"s to contend with.
Although I agree that
Mr Jones’s cat
sounds fine,
here are some other common English surnames that end in “s”:
Peters, Daniels, Michaels, Matthews, Roberts, Phillips, Isaacs, Williams
Most of these sound awful to my ear with in the -'s possessive form:
*Paul Daniels’s magic show
Michael Matthews’s bicycle
Jeremy Isaacs’s opera
John Williams’s score
*
I wouldn’t use any of those.
And most dire of all:
Ned Flanders’s house
I actually find Jesus’s to be less aurally jarring.
Well, I prefer Jones’s.
Surely it would be the Joneses’ cat. You wouldn’t say it’s the cat that belongs to the Jones, would you? The plural of Jones is Joneses.
Just because it’s properly spelled “Flanders’s”, according to Strunk and White, does not mean it is pronounced differently to “Flanders” and “Flanders’”.
Yet S&W make an exception for Jesus, which would hardly seem necessary if pronunciation is not at stake.
If we must have a universal rule based on “logic”, why must it be the arbitrary rule that S&W suggest? It seems to me no less logical to say that any word that already ends in --s, whether singular or plural, forms the genitive by adding just an apostrophe.
In practice, which rule survives (if a universal rule is to prevail at all) will certainly be influenced by whether the resulting genitive is awkward to pronounce, whether it just sounds wrong to most people. And I tend to think that a rule that seeks to introduce an irregular pronunciation that’s at odds with the written form has no chance at all.
I suspect that forming genitives from particular surnames is a rare enough event that the language is unlikely ever to evolve toward consensus across all names.
Is “Jesus” not a latinization of Joshua or Jeshua or something like that? So the proper plural (nom.) would be Jesi. Thus, Jesus’ would not be confused with Jesi’s.
Yes. This is what screws up Homer, and me.
We’ve been “keeping up with the Joneses” for decades.
I’ve always heard it pronounced “Jone-zuz”.
Similarly, I’ve always heard possessive of Jesus pronounced Jeezuz-zuz, as in “Jesus’s miracles”.
Singular Jones,
singular possessive Jones’s,
plural Joneses,
plural possessive Joneses’
— the last three are pronounced identically
I make no exceptions for Jesus.
Of course it does.
Not quite. Ess-apostrophe is only used for plural possessives. But the plural of Jones is Jonses. So the plural possessive is Joneses’, not Jones’.
Singular, plural, possessive, plural possessive.
Jones. Joneses. Jones’s. Joneses’.
Same for Jesus. It drives me batty that the US Christian community has decided that “in Jesus’ name” is proper grammar. “In Jesus’s name”, please.
In Jesuses’ names, I should read to the end of the thread next time! Ascenray said exactly what I did.
I wonder what happens in people’s minds with grammar, punctuation, and other rules of writing? This is stuff I had drilled into me by the third grade. But all over the internet, it’s apparently up for debate? I get descriptivism over prescriptivism, sure. But I wonder how things that were standardized long ago, on purpose, because standardization is a good, useful thing, get so mixed up in people’s minds?
I guess it’s the same as when companies take a standardized product and make a weird proprietary version because they want to be “different”? Blazing your own trail is not a good thing when the topic is language or power supply connectors.
Well, I can tell you what’s happening in my mind. I’m questioning whether there’s any sensible foundation for things that might have been “drilled into me by the third grade”. Does a rigid universal rule “always add -'s to any singular noun” really work to achieve good writing/speaking style? Neither you nor Ascenray have addressed that question, because you’ve only talking about easy examples. I think most people are fine with Jones’s, and probably also Jesus’s, because they sound reasonable. But would you really claim that all of these are good writing/speaking style?
Paul Daniels’s magic show
Michael Matthews’s bicycle
Jeremy Isaacs’s opera
John Williams’s score
And above all:
Ned Flanders’s house
P.S., Not that you’ve done this here (yet!), but when someone says something like this, it’s more often than not a preamble for a bunch of prescriptivist poppycock.
No, it really doesn’t. “Flanders’s”, “Flanders,” and “Flanders’” are pronounced identically. Jones’ and Jones’s are pronounced identically. Only Joneses would have an extra syllable, but it would be identical to Joneses’.
There’s been a trend among style guides to simplify the older standards, probably because they confuse people as in this case. Leaving off the 's in all cases would be accepted in any serious writing that does not need to conform to a particular style guide.
And this is exactly why there can be arguments over these issues. I guarantee that anything you learned in third grade is a ridiculously oversimplified set of “rules” made up so that the teacher could grade papers and not need to know the details of how language actually works. We’ve seen this in a million threads. People come in and say “that’s what I was taught in school” and those who went further have to patiently (as long as our patience holds out) explain why these are not rules at all, but merely styles, that styles don’t agree with one another (exactly why styles are needed and why there are so many of them), and that the rightness or wrongness of usage depends on audience and context, not something a 19th century presciptionist made up out of whole cloth.
A hierarchy must be recognized. Grammar is mostly agreed upon, although 500-page books are needed to distinguish among the possible choices. Spelling is largely fixed, although a check of any dictionary will show how many words have legitimate alternate spellings. Pronunciation is somewhat more variable than spelling, not merely because regional accents create huge differences but because stress on syllables, dropped letters, and where syllables are broken varies over time. Usage or meaning changes constantly, though mostly to add new shades of meaning to words that may extend or even reverse older understanding. (“Literally” being everyone’s favorite example.) Dictionaries are always far behind in recording the latest meanings and no good guides are available. When a word is being used incorrectly and when it has shifted meaning confounds every reader, and sometimes a supposedly older and more educated reader is at a disadvantage in recognizing when the wind has shifted.