I’m not going to embroil myself too deeply in this one - I count myself among the dedicated descriptors who wonders why on earth people so desperately tie language into knots to force mathematical logic on modes of expression neither mathematic nor logical.
To each their own.
And I say that intentionally. English has developed a neuter, whether people find it aesthetically pleasing or not. The New Neuter takes the third person plural and treats it as a third person singular. It sounds odd to older ears, but then again I’m sure the Great Vowel Shift caused no end of trouble for those who grew up with the older pronunciation. Suck it up and deal.
What I detect behind much of the arguing is an ego defending itself: dammit, I expended great effort in learning these rules, so they must be important!
Well, they might or they mightn’t - we’ll see about that. It’s pointless to argue against any linguistic innovation that doesn’t expressly impede the transmission of ideas. Annoying as random sprinklings of apostrophe’s may be, they don’t generally produce ambiguity, and if it ain’t ambiguous, don’t waste your breath trying to fix it.
IANALT (latin teacher) but I did read the introduction to the fifth edition of Black’s Law Dictionary, which describes the controversy surrounding latin pronunciations. It seems that the traditional pronunciation in the 19th and most of the 20th centuries was the anglo-latin, which pronounced alumnae “alumnay” and alumni “alumnigh.” A more recent movement has sought to restore a more “classical” pronunciation, under which the two pronunciations are almost reversed to “alumnigh” and “alumnee,” respectively. (It’s clear the Black’s editors aren’t happy with this development, which they seem to think arose from ill-educated pretension). The result is genuine ambiguity.
And of course the solution is simply to drop the ending and use “alum,” which is probably where we’ll end up.
Language is not to be pretty, it is to be practical. If it’s pretty it’s usually a happy accident, signifying nothing.
