User:SMcCandlish/English/Apostrophe-s

Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

Draft sourcing for

WT:MOS
proposal and for article on English possessive.

2017 is a good time to re-examine apostrophe-s

Most of the major style guides have been updated in the last few years (only Chicago is still pending). While the new editions have not been out long enough to have affected usage much if at all, the fact that they generally haven't changed on this since the previous editions (the ones most of MoS is based on) is telling. This is one of the few places where MoS is not based on anything other than failure to come to agreement, but there is a clear direction we obviously should be taking it;

Any kind of pronunciation pseudo-rule (e.g. to use "St. Louis'" in reference to the place in Missouri because of the /s/ sound at the end of that pronunciation of "Louis") is unworkable except in a regional publication. Major style guides have largely abandoned the notion, because pronunciation varies, even within a particular national variety, both in the US and the UK, which have many regional dialectal variations, as do Canada, Ireland, and (I gather) Australia. Style guides have always been divided on this punctuation as a general matter (since the late 18th c., according to Fowler's). Few of note have a pronunciation-based approach (when they do, they offer conflicting wanna-be rules about that). The editorship here has been divided as well; this comes up fairly frequently and there's never a clear "this is preferable, these aren't" result, just a "we're still arguing" lack of consensus. Time to move past that.

Using an apostrophe alone is obviously preferred by some simply as what they're used to. But it doesn't make sense on Wikipedia, for numerous reasons, and we don't need a style guide sourcing dump to figure this out; it's obvious.

  • The apostrophe-only style is confusing to readers; some constructions are badly ambiguous, and even when not, it often requires a double-take to be sure what meaning is intended.
  • It's inconsistent with the rest of the punctuation system.
  • It causes inconsistency from page to page.
  • It causes inconsistency within the same page, even the same sentence (the MoS cardinal sin).
  • The only rationale in favor of it seems to be "it exists" (so do lots of other things WP dispenses with).
  • There is no rationale on Wikipedia to use an intentionally ambiguous punctuation variant when ...
    • the ambiguous one has no tenable
      WP:ENGVAR
      argument to be made for it; and
    • the alternative is more common,
    • lacks the ambiguity, and
    • is universally recognizable, presenting no comprehensibility problem to anyone.
  • In sum: This is a core
    WP:COMMONALITY
    matter. It's not appreciably different from the "9:00" (versus ambiguous "9.00") time format in a discussion above: some like their "very slightly smaller" version but there are user-facing reasons to avoid it.


Just to start off, let's look at the main style guides MoS is based on (all the examples are direct quotations from these works unless otherwise noted):

  • Chicago University Press
    . 2010. Sections 7.15, 7.16, 7.17, 7.18, 7.20, 7.21.    " CMoS says to use 's consistently, regardless of spelling or sound, with examples including: horse's, bass's, Kansas's, Marx's, Berlio's, etc. It makes no exception for names of religious figures or those from classical antiquity, giving: Jesus's, Tacitus's, Xerxes's; in this, it is reversing the stance of previous editions (yes, the CMoS actually does get updated to reflect current practice, though much slower than most of us would like). It also reverses a change in the prior edition that was roundly criticized and ignored; it now again recommends apostrophe-s after [mostly French] words and names that end with a silent -s, e.g. marquis's, Descartes's, Albert Camus's. CMoS does not admit of any kind of "punctuate it the way you think it should be read aloud" idea, and rejection of the idea of consistent pronunciation is stated as one of the reasons for the return to 's for words/names that end in a (usually) silent s. (They don't provide an example, but there's an obvious one in the examples they did use: "marquis" often does not have a silent s in Scottish English, and may be treated as if spelled "mar-kwiss".) CMoS does observe, as "an alternative practice", the habit of just using an apostrophe for everything that ends with s (regardless of /s/ or /z/ pronunciation), of which it says: "Though easy to apply and economical, such usage disregards pronunciation and is therefore not recommended." So, CMoS is against doing something that hides/confuses pronunciation, but is also not in favor of trying to mimic what any particular dialect might expect.
  • Mars
    's gravitational force    . MoS, per WP:CREEP, isn't going to have rule this twiddly. The new 2nd ed. (2014; ed. Anne Waddingham; pp. 69, 71) preserves the same exact wording. No only is WP not written in archaisms. and we have no justification for inconsistency in the same work between Mars' here but Mars's over there, much less in the same article between Zeus's and Euripides'; it does nothing at all useful for us or the reader, and is likely to confuse and to generate editorial strife. So, this ultimately also points us to just standardize on 's. Oh, and NHR also says "Use 's after French names ending in silent s, x, or z, when used possessively in English: Dumas's, Descartes's", to address the original question of the thread.
  • Both of the above make a conventional exception for traditional phrases of the "for [something]'s sake" form where the something ends in s: for goodness' sake. CMoS does not extend this to words that just have an /s/ or /z/ sound at the end (thus for appearances's sake), or to colloquial constructions that do end in s (for Jesus's sake). NHR applies the "rule" to any such construction where the something ends with a /s/ or /z/ sound, but illustrates no examples beyond goodness'. It's unclear why this partial and conflicting but overlapping exception has been drawn by these style guides, other than just observation that people tend to sometimes write that way; it is inconsistent (in both versions) with the rest of the system and doesn't seem to serve a purpose. At least CMoS is internally consistent in throwing out any "punctuate it like you think it should sound" plan. One would surmise that NHR thinks such an idea is tenable at all because they're writing for "
    received pronunciation
    ", in a system when "the Queen's English" has a social but not linguistic special position; but it's unclear, as they don't state why outright.
  • Fowler, H. W.
    , eds. (2000). "Apostrophe²". Fowler's Modern English (3rd ed.). Oxford U. Pr. pp. 60–62.     Folwer's observes that ever since uses of the apostrophe mid-word for missing letters, before a terminal s for a possessives, and after a terminal s for a plural possessive, were in place by the late 18th c., that "gross disturbances of these basic patterns have occurred in written and printed work .... Such instability suggests that further disturbances should be expected in the 21C." [Sic; it makes heavy use of various abbreviations for eras, etc.]
 — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼  07:33, 7 September 2017 (UTC)
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