Comment by treetalker

lol, what an amazing meta exchange right there

All of the pronoun contractions are somewhat inconsistent with noun possessives. So "its", but "the dog's". There's no reason why you couldn't write "it's" for both "it is" and "its". You already write both "the dog's ball" and "the dog's tired", and both "it's" and "it's" are pronounced identically, which doesn't pose any difficulties in speech.

His, her, and my are a different matter, since they are all pronounced differently from he's*, she's, and I'm.

* at least in most accents, "his" uses the kit vowel, while "he's" uses the fleece vowel

tbh I'm not quite sure if you're arguing in favor of switching to "it's" or against. I think against...?

Clearly "x is" is most consistent in that example, implying the possessive form is inconsistent.

Also clearly in a straightforward example

  John possesses -> John's
  The dog possesses -> Dog's
  It possesses -> It's
  Xe possesses -> Xe's

is equally as consistent as "x is", which is more consistent than "Its".

(yes I'm aware there's a proper noun vs pronoun change in there, but I'm not sure that's an argument for "special noun cases are good". they undeniably exist, but should we encourage them?)

Actually if we’re keeping with the pattern it would be Shis

Believe or not, "it's" as a possessive form came before "its."

Source: https://www.merriam-webster.com/grammar/the-tangled-history-...

> The only one breaking the pattern is Her, which instead should be Shes if we wanted to keep things consistent.

It should be "She > Shis" if we want to keep it consistent with "He > His" and not with "It > Its".

She->her (like everything in English) makes a lot more sense if you start in the roots of English. She was “hio” or “heo” and her was “hire”. By the 13th century, the pronunciations of he and heo had converged and become synonyms so “she” was introduced.

She shares a letter with seo, which was the root of both he and heo.

Simple pattern matching really can’t work in English - the roots are way too messy. And it’s absolutely amazing that people can become reasonably fluent if they only start learning as adults.

I have yet to encounter a case where words need an apostrophe to disambiguate. It’s just an unnecessary exception. Writing is about communication and if everyone knows what you mean without the apostrophe then it adds no value.

Same thing with book authors who have a good idea that can be expressed in 50 pages but for some reason publishers want 180+, so you end up with 130 pages of fluff, wasting everyone’s time.