Apostrophe
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- For other uses, see Apostrophe (disambiguation).
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apostrophe ( ' ) ( ’ ) |
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ampersand ( & ) |
An apostrophe ( ’ ) is a punctuation and sometimes diacritic mark in languages written in the Latin alphabet. In English, it marks omissions, forms the possessive, and, in special cases, helps form plurals. The word comes from Greek Template:Lang, the accent of elision, through French.
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English language usage
Basic principles: possessive apostrophe
- An apostrophe is used to indicate possession.
- In most cases the ending 's is added, e.g. the cat's whiskers.
- If the word is plural and already ends in an s, then instead only an apostrophe is added, e.g. my nieces' weddings. (This does not apply to plurals that do not end in an s, e.g. the children's toys.)
- If the word ends in an s but is singular, practice varies as to whether to add 's or only an apostrophe. As a special case, Jesus' is very commonly written instead of Jesus's, even by people who would otherwise add 's e.g. James's, Chris's. Similar examples of notable names ending in an s that are often given a possessive apostrophe with no additional s include Dickens and Williams. In many publishing companies, a policy of always leaving off the additional s on any such name is adopted for consistency, but this can prove problematic when specific names are contradictory, for example St James' Park in Newcastle (the football ground) and the area of St James's Park in London.
- Some people like to reflect standard spoken practice in certain special cases like these: for convenience' sake, for goodness' sake. Others prefer to add 's in the standard way: for convenience's sake. It is best at least to be consistent in such cases.
- In general, a good practice is to follow whichever spoken form is judged best: Boss's shoes, but Mrs. Jones' organ. In many cases, both spoken and written forms will differ between people.
- No apostrophe is used in the following possessive pronouns and adjectives: yours, his, hers, ours, its, theirs, and whose. (Very many people wrongly use it's for the possessive of it; but authorities are unanimous that it's can only properly be a contraction of it is or it has.) All other possessive pronouns ending in s do take an apostrophe: one's; everyone's; somebody's, nobody else's, etc. With plural forms, the apostrophe follows the s, as with nouns: the others' husbands.
Basic principles: apostrophe showing omission
- An apostrophe is commonly used to indicate omitted characters:
- It is used in abbreviations, as gov't for government, or '70s for 1970s. Note: These days apostrophes are generally omitted when letters are removed from the start of a word. For example, it is not common to write 'bus, 'phone, 'net.
- It is used in contractions, such as can't from cannot and it's from it is or it has.
- An apostrophe is used by some writers to form a plural for abbreviations and symbols where adding just s rather than 's would be ambiguous. While British English did formerly endorse the use of such apostrophes after numbers and dates, this usage has now largely been superseded.
- In the US, it is generally accepted to use apostrophes to show plurals of single lower-case letters, such as mind your p's and q's. However, this is far from universally accepted practice, and instead of writing "ps and qs" which may look slightly confusing, many editors recommend "Ps and Qs" or "Ps and Qs."
- For the plural of abbreviations, an apostrophe is widely (but not universally) regarded as incorrect, so CDs is thought by many to be preferable to CD's.
- For groups of years, the apostrophe at the end cannot be regarded as necessary, since there is no possibility of misreading. For this reason, many authorities prefer 1960s to 1960's, and 90s or '90s to '90's.
- Finally, a few sources [1] accept its use as an alternative spelling of the plurals of a very few short words (such as do, ex, yes, no; in each case, dos, exes, yesses and noes would be preferred). But this is also often frowned upon. It's a case of the "Hey, that doesn't look quite right when written correctly. Let's stick an apostrophe there instead!"
Non-English names
- Irish surnames often contain apostrophes, for instance the name O'Reilly. This arose from a rendering of the Irish Ó.
- Some Scottish and Irish surnames use an apostrophe, such as M'Gregor. The apostrophe here is a contraction where the prefix Mc or Mac would normally appear. (Or in earlier and meticulous current usage, it is ‘ – a kind of reversed apostrophe.)
- French and Italian surnames sometimes contain apostrophes, e.g. D'Angelo. Other times, foreign names that would have used an accented character have an apostrophe substituted, e.g. DuPre'.
- The English possessive of French names ending is a silent s is rendered differently by different authorities. Some prefer Descartes' and Dumas', while others insist on Descartes's and Dumas's. Certainly an s sound (or strictly a z sound, with Dumas) is pronounced in these cases; the theoretical question is whether the existing s is the one that is sounded, or whether another s needs to be supplied. Once more, the best advice to follow is simply be consistent.
Geographic names
US place names usually take no apostrophe, except in a few special circumstances. The United States Geologic Survey, which has responsibility for formal naming of municipalities and geographic features, has deprecated the apostrophe since 1890. As of 2005, only five place names in the U.S. are officially spelled with an apostrophe (one example being Martha's Vineyard). On the other hand, Britain has Bishop's Stortford, and while Newcastle United play at St. James' Park, London has a St. James's Park. The special circumstances in the latter case may be this: the customary pronunciation of this place name is reflected in the addition of an extra -s. Since usage is firmly against a doubling of the final -s without an apostrophe, this place name has an apostrophe. None of this detracts from the fact that omission of the apostrophe in geographical names is becoming a clear standard in most English-speaking countries, including Britain and Australia.
Business names
Where a business's name is based on a family name, it will typically take no apostrophe, thus McMenamins Pub, or Roches Stores. Names based on a first name are more likely to take an apostrophe (Joe's Crab Shack), perhaps because there is no ambiguity about whether the putative owner is an individual.
Possessive form of words ending in s
- When the noun is plural and already ends in s, no extra s is added in the possessive, so pens' lids (where there is more than one pen) rather than pens's lids. If the plural noun doesn't end in s, then add s as usual: children's hats.
- While it is commonly perceived that words ending in s simply gain an apostrophe in their possessive form (Mr. Jones' sock garters), the University of Delaware provides these guidelines [2]:
- To form the possessive of a plural noun ending in "s" simply add an apostrophe.
- dogs' bones
- boys' bicycles
- When forming the possessive of singular words ending in "s", be guided by the pronounciation:
- Boss's shoes
- Mrs. Jones' organ
- To form the possessive of a plural noun ending in "s" simply add an apostrophe.
Greengrocers' apostrophes
Apostrophes used incorrectly to form plurals are known as greengrocers' apostrophes (also: greengrocer's apostrophes, grocers' apostrophes or grocer's apostrophes, sometimes humorously greengrocers apostrophe's). The term was coined in the United Kingdom where such mistakes are common in the signs and advertisements of greengrocers, e.g. “Apple's and orange's for sale, 50% off”. In recent years, however, this mis-use has become increasingly frequent in other forms of advertisement, particularly those of small businesses, e.g. from Hackney Market in London, UK “Christma's Card's”. The practice comes from a widespread ignorance of the use of the apostrophe and the identical sound of the plural and possessive forms of most nouns.
This usage has been parodied by Terry Pratchett in his novel Going Postal, in which a greengrocer goes 'so far a's to us'e greengrocer's apo'strophe's in 'speech.
Derivation
The use of the apostrophe to mark the English possessive ultimately derives from the Old English genitive case, indicating possession, which often ended in the letters -es, which evolved into a simple s for the possessive ending. An apostrophe was later added to mark the omitted e; this came into general use in the 17th century. The 's ending is sometimes called the Saxon genitive, but is now generally considered a clitic.
Other languages
- In many European languages, the apostrophe is used to indicate a contraction, often resulting from the elision of a vowel. For example, in the French phrases coup d'état and maître d'hôtel (the latter often shortened to maître d', when used by English speakers), the vowel in the preposition de (of) is elided because the word which follows it also starts with a vowel. This is common in Italian, too.
- In German, this is very similar: an apostrophe is used only to indicate omitted letters. It must not be used for plurals or possessive forms, both usages which are widespread, but deemed wrong. (See article Apostrophitis in the German Wikipedia.)
- In the Dutch language, it is also used to indicate omitted characters. In addition however, it is used for plurals where the singulars end with certain vowels, e.g. foto's, taxi's, and for the genitive of proper names ending with these vowels, e.g. Anna's, Otto's.
- In the Slovak and Czech languages, common typographic rendering (at least for some typefaces) of caron over lowercase t, d, l, and uppercase L consonants (ď, ť, ľ, Ľ) looks a lot like an apostrophe, but it is very incorrect to use apostrophe instead (compare previous example with incorrect d', t', l', L'). In Slovak, there is also l with acute accent (ĺ, Ĺ). In Slovak, it is used to indicate elision in certain words (tys' as an abbreviated form of ty si), however, these elisions are restricted to poetry.
- In the Belarusian and Ukrainian languages, the apostrophe is used between a consonant and the following “soft” (iotified) vowel (е, ё, є, ю, я) to indicate that no palatalization of the preceding consonant takes place, and the vowel is pronounced in the same way as at the beginning of the word. The same function is served by the hard sign in some other Cyrillic alphabets.
- In some transliterations from the Cyrillic alphabet (of Belarusian, Russian, or Ukrainian language), the apostrophe is used to replace the soft sign (ь, indicating palatalization of the preceding consonant), e.g., Русь is transliterated Rus' according to the BGN/PCGN system. Confusingly, some of these transliteration schemes use a double apostrophe ( ” ) to represent the apostrophe in Cyrillic text, e.g. Ukrainian слов'янське (“Slavic”) is transliterated as slov”yans'ke.
- Some Karelian orthographies use an apostrophe to indicate palatalization, e.g. n'evvuo "to give advice", d'uuri "just (like)", el'vüttiä "to revive".
- In some languages it represents the glottal stop (as in Hawai'i, see ‘okina) or similar sounds in the Turkic language and in romanizations of Arabic languages. Sometimes this function is performed by the opening single quotation mark.
- In Guaraní it performs the same function but it's considered a different letter on its own, called puso (/pu'so/), as in the words ñe'ẽ, ka'a, a' ỹ.
- In Finnish, one of the consonant gradation patterns is the change of a 'k' into a hiatus, e.g. keko → keon "a pile → pile's". This hiatus has to be indicated in spelling with an apostrophe, if a long vowel or a diphthong would be immediately followed by the final vowel, e.g. ruoko → ruo'on, vaaka → vaa'an. (This is in contrast to compound words, where the same problem is solved with a hyphen, e.g. maa-ala "land area".) The same meaning for an apostrophe, a hiatus, is used in poetry to indicate contractions, e.g. miss' on for missä on "where is".
- In the Hànyǔ Pīnyīn (pinyin) system of romanization for Standard Mandarin, the apostrophe is used to separate syllables in a word where ambiguity could arise.
- In Jèrriais, one of the uses of the apostrophe is to mark gemination. For example, t't represents a long /t/, s's a long /s/, n'n a long /n/, th'th a long /Template:IPA/, and ch'ch a long /Template:IPA/.
- In Afrikaans it is used to show that letters have been omitted from words. The most common use is in the indefinite article ‘n which is a contraction of een meaning 'one' (the number). As the initial 'e' is omitted and cannot be capitalised, if a sentence begins with ‘n the second word in the sentence is capitalised. For example: ‘n Boek is groen. 'A book is green'.
Alternative uses
- The vertical typewriter apostrophe (') is often used to approximate the prime (used a symbol to indicate measurement in feet or arcminutes); the right single quotation mark apostrophe is less appropriate in this context.
- In science fiction, the apostrophe is often used to decorate alien names, e.g. Z'ha'dum in Babylon 5.
- The Brazilian native language Tupi and the fictional language of Klingon use an apostrophe to denote a glottal stop, while the constructed Lojban language uses an apostrophe to denote an voiceless glottal fricative.
- The ' (apostrophe) was the name of a known hacker in the first-person-shooter game Counter-Strike.
Computers and Unicode
There are three types of apostrophe character in Unicode:
- ( ' ) Vertical typewriter apostrophe (Unicode name "apostrophe" or "apostrophe-quote"), Unicode and ASCII character 39, or hexadecimal U+0027.
- ( ’ ) Punctuation apostrophe ("right single quotation mark" or "single comma quotation mark"), U+2019.
- ( ʼ ) Letter apostrophe ("modifier letter apostrophe"), U+02BC.
In most cases, the preferred apostrophe character is the punctuation apostrophe (distinguished as typographic, or curly apostrophe). But historically, only the vertical typewriter apostrophe has been present on computer keyboards and in 7-bit ASCII character encoding. The typographic apostrophe is in different positions of the many 8-bit encodings.
So in practice, the typewriter apostrophe is much more commonly used by writers and editors. For the same historic reasons, the typewriter apostrophe is a highly overloaded character position. In ASCII, it represents a right single quotation mark, left single quotation mark, apostrophe punctuation, vertical line, or prime (punctuation marks) or an apostrophe modifier or acute accent (modifier letters).
In some cases an apostrophe is not considered punctuation which separates letters, but as a letter in its own right; a letter apostrophe. Examples are in some national languages where the apostrophe is considered a letter (e.g., the Cyrillic Azerbaijani alphabet), or in some transliterations (e.g., transliterated Arabic glottal stop, hamza, or transliterated Cyrillic soft sign). As the letter apostrophe is seldom used in practice, the Unicode standard cautions that one should never assume text is coded thus.
The Nenets language has single and double letter apostrophes:
- ( ˮ ) Double letter apostrophe (Unicode name "modifier letter double apostrophe"), U+02EE.
Entering apostrophes
During text entry on computers, some programs automatically convert to the appropriate apostrophe or quotation mark characters; the so-called "smart quotes" feature. Apostrophes and quotation marks that are not automatically altered by computer programs are known as "dumb quotes". Such conversion can be provided by word processing software as you type, or on web servers after submitting text in a form field, e.g., on weblogs or free encyclopedias. Many such software programs incorrectly enter an opening quotation mark for a leading apostrophe (e.g., in abbreviations of years: ‘04 rather than ’04 for 2004), or an apostrophe for a prime (e.g., latitude 49° 53′ 08″).
A useful quick solution to get such cases right in Microsoft Word is to type two apostrophes, and then simply delete the first.
On Microsoft Windows, Unicode special characters can be entered explicitly by holding the ALT key and typing the four-digit decimal code position of the character. An apostrophe is entered by holding alt while typing 8217. (Typing a three-digit code will enter a character value in the current code page, which may not correspond to its Unicode value.)
On the Apple Macintosh, special characters are typed while holding down the option key, or option and shift keys together. In Macintosh English-language keyboard layouts, an apostrophe is typed with the shortcut option-shift-]
In publishing, typewriter apostrophes are always converted to typographic apostrophes. To a graphic designer's or typographer's eye, the appearance of the former in print is a glaring sign of unprofessionalism. Because of the egalitarian nature of electronic publishing, and the low resolution of computer monitors in comparison to print, typewriter apostrophes have been considered much more tolerable on the web. However, due to the wide adoption of the Unicode text encoding standard, near-universal web browser support, higher-resolution displays, and advanced anti-aliasing of text in modern operating systems, the use of typographic apostrophes is becoming common on web sites by discerning designers. Unfortunately, such use is not always done in accordance with the standards for character sets and encodings, as mentioned more fully below.
Eight-bit encodings
Older 8-bit character encodings, such as ISO-8859-1, Windows CP1252, or MacRoman, universally support the typewriter apostrophe in the same position, 39, inherited from ASCII (as does Unicode). But most of them place the typographic apostrophe in different positions. ISO-8859-1, the most common encoding used for web pages, omits the typographic apostrophe altogether.
Microsoft Windows CP1252 (sometimes incorrectly called ANSI or ISO-Latin) is a duplicate of ISO-8859-1, with 27 additional characters in the place of control characters (in the range from 128 to 159). Microsoft software usually treats ISO-8859-1 as if it were CP1252. The wide adoption of Microsoft's web browser and web server has forced many other software makers to adopt this as a de facto convention—in some cases contravening established standards unnecessarily (e.g., some applications use CP1252 character values in HTML numeric references, where Unicode values are required, and would be sufficient for interoperation with MS software). Consequently, the typographic apostrophe and several other characters are handled inconsistently by web browsers and other software, and can cause interoperation problems.
References
- Lynne Truss, Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation, 2003. Gotham Books, Toronto (North American edition). ISBN 1-592-40087-6
See also
External links
- Apostrophe Abuser's Anonymou's (Humorous page decrying the abuse of apostrophes)
- The Complete Retard's Guide to the English Language: The Apostrophe Catastrophe
- Bob's Quick Guide to the Apostrophe, You Idiots (GIF image, from Bob the Angry Flower)
- Bob's Quick Guide to Destroying the Apostrophe, You Idiots (GIF image, from Bob the Angry Flower)
- Plural's (GIF image, from Bob the Angry Flower)
- alt.possessive.its.has.no.apostrophe newsgroup
- Apostrophe usage
- The Apostrophe Protection Society
- ASCII and Unicode quotation marks
- Apostrophe and acute accent confusion
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