I'm fairly sure that when reading almost anything we can all find something that we don't like. One of the things I find annoying is the misuse of the apostrophe. I have come across an interesting (at least to me) site that I think authors might find useful. Although a UK site, it does apply to American usage of our language.
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Comments
Gods, you have to love English.
The way that last sentence was constructed is one of the wonderful ways you can misuse or misunderstand concepts.
"It does apply to American usage of our language." With the implication being that "It's ours, we just let the Americans use it now and then."
Thank you, I needed the chuckle.
I'll get a life when it's proven and substantiated to be better than what I'm currently experiencing.
For the English
That's not an implication, that's common knowledge! ;-)
“When a clown moves into a palace, he doesn’t become a king. The palace becomes a circus.” - Turkish Proverb
Not bad for rules
'Course, like most such sites and pages, it makes no distinction between possessive and genitive but it isn't a salient difference in English.
The difference is in the following sentences:
Bobby's work that day was exceptional. (Bobby owns the work or is an agent that creates the work.)
Bobby put in an exceptional day's work. (The work originates within or is measured by the day.)
Bobby was paid a day's wage for his work. (The day measures or passively originates the wage.)
The first above is possessive, the second and third are genitive. Like I said, not an important difference unless you intend to translate into a language that makes a greater distinction than English does. My explanation above of the difference is my own, reconstructed from study of other languages and may not agree with textbook definitions but it's how I work out which is which when it matters. :)
Hugs,
Erin
= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.
Possessive vs Genative
There is no difference. Genitive is the Latin word, possessive is the English word for the same case, created because someone now forgotten (or maybe best forgotten) decided we didn't want to teach the kids the proper words.
To speak more precisely, cases describe inflectional (spelling) differences when the same word (a noun or pronoun) is used in different grammatical functions, and have nothing to do with the meaning (semantic role.) If the noun is being used as subject, it's in the nominative/subjective case, although some grammarians prefer to call it the unmarked case. If it's an object (including indirect object), you use the accusative/objective case. If it's being used as an adjective to qualify a noun (Sally's room,) then you use the genitive/possessive. There are a few weird corner cases, but that's the gist.
If I say "Sally's room," there is no implication that Sally owns the room in the sense of being able to take out a mortgage on it or sell it. Whoever decided to "simplify" the terminology rather than use the standard grammatical term has caused a great deal of confusion, because a lot of people think it must indicate possession, when in fact literal possession is only one of the situations involved.
Xaltatun
BZZZ!
There are languages that have different constructions for the two things.
Possessive indicates ownership or at least simple possession; genitive also indicates origin, purpose, composition or measurement. Genitive is the larger category.
Yes, the English version could equally be called genitive or possessive since we only have one, the same is true of most Indo-European languages. For English, you are more or less correct. But even in that, there are situations where other Euro-languages use the genitive and English prefers to use some other construction. Can't think of an example at the moment. :) We generally use an "of" construction for a partitive genitive but not always and that's kind of trivial.
My point was that in translation, you have to know this and be able to separate simple possession from the other uses of the genitive. Why do I care about translation? Because I used to work as a translator and this came up while doing a translation once. :)
All wheels are round but not all round things are wheels. THAT came up in a translation once, too. :)
Hugs,
Erin
= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.
Quite true
You're quite right, when you're translating, words in one case don't necessarily translate into the same case in the other language. That's not a reason to try to complicate English. English only has three cases as long as you follow the rule that if there are no words that are spelled differently, then there is no separate case (*). The unfortunate thing is that professional linguists will use one set of terms (nominative, accusative and genitive) while we try to teach the kids a different set of terms for exactly the same thing (subjective, objective and possessive.)
Xaltatun
(*) If you don't, then there's a dative case that's used for the indirect object. However, it's always the same as the accusative case spelling.
I suppose one US/UK difference...
There are two uses of the apostrophe that are missing from that page, and one could be due to it being on a UK site. Here's the first:
4'
which is neither a contraction, nor possessive — and not even genitive.
It means "four feet" — perhaps the English writer is too young to remember. Of course, 4's wouldn't meant "four feets" — you have to write that out if that's what you intend. (And if you meant "four feats" it would be even more wrong.)
The second use is in angular measure: an expression like
30°10'
means "thirty degrees and ten minutes" — there are 360 degrees in a circle, and 60 minutes in every degree.
Please try to not mix up these uses of the apostrophe. You may have people rolling in the aisles, but it's simply wrong.
4 feet
Maybe they don't have feet as a measurement in the UK, I thought they were metric.
Katie Leone (Katie-Leone.com)
Writing is what you do when you put pen to paper, being an author is what you do when you bring words to life
Oh but we do.
Even at my advanced age I wish we'd bite the bullet and join the rest of the world and go 100% metric but there are a few old fogies (often younger than I) who cling passionately to (Roman) Imperial units. Just one Imperial unit I like is the pint, which is just the right volume for a decent drink of draught (real) ale. Of course there is no hope for the USA which clings to Imperial units (except for liquid volumes) and their funny 'English' (though we've never used them) threads.
If you're interested in apostrophes then you can do no better than reading Lynne Truss's excellent book 'Eats shoots and leaves' which has the advantage of being funny, too.
Robi
you can't be more embarrassed than scientists
My astroscience friends long ago gave up pretending imperial measurements made any sense at all.
Of course, crashing a very important space probe due to conflicts in imperial vs metric measurements was the final indignity.
Parsecs, people. Parsecs! ;)
not as think as i smart i am
To say nothing ...
... of forced landing an airliner because of running out of fuel. Google 'Gimli Glider' :)
Robi
Never mind...
...unit confusion also provided the premise of a popular cartoon series: Jimbo and the Jet Set.
Although somehow in reality I think real engineers would (hopefully) realise there was something slightly off about specifiying a plane 2.54 times smaller than average...
As the right side of the brain controls the left side of the body, then only left-handers are in their right mind!
Well, I grew up with _both_
Well, I grew up with _both_ (Canadian/American), and quite frankly, for most day-to-day operations, Imperial works better than French Imperial. Sorry, Metric.
Part of what ticks me off about the 'Metric' system is that the only reason it really made it at all was that Napoleon hated the English (English measurement system being the main 'standard' at the time), and found out that someone had been playing with numbers under the previous regime. It actually makes less sense in construction than Imperial.
Imperial measurement systems were developed, mostly, out of use. That is, they were measurements people used all the time, but were then codified. A 'foot' was roughly the length of a man's foot. An 'inch' was a knucklebone (often). A 'yard' was 'three feet' - but there was also a clothyard. That's the distance from your thumb and first finger pinched together, to the opposite shoulder. (That's how you measured fabric. Grab the fabric, pull it across to the shoulder, just like how you drew a bow. Thus a clothyard shaft for arrows)
Why is a foot twelve inches? Easy - it's easily fractionable. People naturally work with fractions, but they don't naturally work with decimals. "How much do you want? About a third of it." Fold a square in half. It's now 'half', not just 50%. Fold that in 'half' again. What it is now? Quarters. Fold that again, and you're now at eighths. Whoops, we just left where you could easily do decimal.
Temperature? Give me a break. The biggest benefit of the Farenheit(sp) system is that it has a large range to work with. It may have started with contaminated water (thus the freeze being -32, and boiling at 212), but that means that there's almost double the granularity - and people are very sensitive to temperature changes. 100 degrees to work with vs 180 - doesn't seem like much, but it's a pain in the ass saying "It's 19.5 degrees" vs '67'.
People make too much over the beginnings of things, rather than their later utility. If they'd wanted to be _useful_, they would have made a _metric_ fathom, divided into 100 inches, rather than 72. (Or something similar. Metric foot of 10 inches, then just use 'yards'?) I mean, people that use metric on products STUPID. When I use measurements, I reduce - we were taught that in math. That means you don't use large numbers when small numbers will work. Thus, why do I keep being sold things that are (making something up) 120 centimetres long? That's 12 decimeters. Or 1.2 meters. That's like selling me something and telling me it's 120 cents, rather than a dollar 20. (I have to buy capacitors, and they keep telling me everything in millimetres. It's ONE CENTIMETRE, knotheads! It's not 10mm)
I swear, the measurements are so damned close on some things that they _had_ to be designed _against_ the Imperial system.
Anyway - the Imperial measurements are generally close to things you work with every day. The base of the Imperial? The foot, or the inch. It's small enough that everyone has something on them (foot, hand, knuckle) about the right size to make quick measurements. The Metric system? The Meter. I don't know about you, but I don't carry a yardstick around either. Nobody uses decimeters, and almost nobody has a fingernail the right size for a centimeter.
As for the meter? It was a fantasy based around a percentage of the earth's circumference. Why? Because it sounded good, not because it made sense. They didn't even _know_ the earth's circumference accurately. (They did get close, however)
Another item. There is no unit of weight in the Metric system. None. There are units of force, and units of mass, but not weight. Doesn't sound like much, until you realize two things. 1) Anywhere outside of the earth's gravitational field, you -really- need to know weight. 2) Mass isn't important in a 1 G field.
Why? Well, let's assume that I have a set of shelves on the moon. On the Earth, it's rated for 400 pounds per shelf. (181 kilograms). Okay, so I've put it up. How much stuff can I put on it? Ooooh, I'm a metric snob, so I realize I can only put 181 kilograms on it, right? Or, I'm smart, and realize that I can actually put 400 pounds on it, which means 1,088 kilograms. Mass is important when imparting motive force (kinetic energy). Mass is not important when at rest - weight is important. Also, people can lift and hold weight - not mass. The change in energy is very important, but that's learned more by doing. (I'd be able to pick up 300 kilograms and carry it, but I'd have to move very slowly - it takes more energy to impart the 'force' to the 'mass'; to my body, the weight is what it cares about)
As I've pointed out (I hope) the biggest difference between the two is that one was developed by people to use, the other was developed to be used by scientists. Should we get rid of one? Nope. I may not like the metric system, but I do realize that computers work better in decimals. People, on the other hand, don't. Conversions may seem like a pain, but as long as you know they're there, they aren't that big of a deal.
As for the French not being able to convert? I'd say that's more information about the French than NASA.
I'll get a life when it's proven and substantiated to be better than what I'm currently experiencing.
Henry Higgins
While singing "Why Can't the English", referring to the proper use of the English language relates, "That in America they have not used it in years."
Rami
RAMI
Did anyone catch the error?
I suppose that we all mistakes. Did anyone see the mistakes on the referred page?
In the last section, 'Sometimes there's no thing to possess or be possessed', the example of 'twelve week's notice' and 'two year's experience' are incorrect. The phrases could be seen as elliptical (see ellipsis) and are shortened versions of 'notice of twelve weeks' and 'experience of two years'. Or they could be just what they appear, nouns with adjectives: 'notice' modified with the adjective 'twelve weeks'; and 'experience' modified with the adjective 'two years'.
There is nothing possessed, nor any acknowledged contraction, so no apostrophe.
One of my pet peeves that they didn't mention is the use of an apostrophe to indicate plural. For example, I have seen folks use "assembly's" where the correct usage is "assemblies".
So much for being divided by a common language, eh?
Janet
Mistress of the Guild of Evil [Strawberry] Blonde Proofreaders
To be or not to be... ask Schrodinger's cat.
"common" language...
It's not common at all, it's a very divided language. Perhaps the most changeable language in the world.
BTW... You made a mistake as well. You forgot the word "make" in your first sentence. "We all mistakes," eh? Definitely not true and not at all what you meant to say... :P
Abigail Drew.
perhaps
It was intended to be "We are all mistakes". Or even "We all love mistakes."
"Mistakes are we all having!"
I'll get a life when it's proven and substantiated to be better than what I'm currently experiencing.
Erroneous zones
Yes, I made a mistake when I missed the word, proving the point, I think, however unintentionally.
My other comment was in reference to Bernard Shaw's famous quote, "England and America are two countries separated by the same language."
And, indeed, you are quite correct. With the regional variations, dialects, patois, gullahs, pidgins, etc., it is an extremely complex language.
Thanks for your comments.
Janet
Mistress of the Guild of Evil [Strawberry] Blonde Proofreaders
To be or not to be... ask Schrodinger's cat.
Non-errors
That's not an error. As I said in my reply to Erin, the "possessive case" does not denote literal possession, it denotes that a noun or pronoun is being used as an adjective to qualify a noun. Whoever decided to use the word "possessive" instead of the proper "genitive" has caused a lot of confusion.
Xaltatun
Sorry, not exactly
Those phrases are not necessarily ellipses, they are genitive; which is what I was taking about above. And yes, English does use the apostrophe for the genitive, of which the possessive is just one sub-case.
But yes, you could interpret the phrases as elliptical and NOT use the apostrophe. In this case, both with and without the apostrophe could be seen as correct.
Like you, though, I would probably "correct" them to NOT use the apostrophe. LOL.
Hugs,
Erin
= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.
The English language differences
between America and the U.K. makes for some great differences between both cultures as both nations have different words to describe some things, including punctuation and spelling.
May Your Light Forever Shine
George Bernard Shaw once said
The United States and England are two countries separated by a common language.
Daniel, author of maid, whore, bimbo, and sissy free TG fiction since 2000
What the world needs is more geniuses with humility; there are so few of us left.- Oscar Levant
References
When I need to check punctuation rules, I refer to one of the references in my library: either Garner's Modern American Usage (3rd edition, 2009) or the Chicago Manual of Style (16th edition.) Beyond that, I simply grit my teeth and go on when someone's punctuation is beyond the pale. Muphry's rule that any post criticizing someone's grammar has errors of its own is just about as merciless as Murphy's law. (Notice the spelling difference.)
"Eats, shoots and leaves" is amusing and if it gets someone to think about how bad punctuation can cause ambiguities it's all to the good, but it's not an authority to rely on. Neither is The Toxic Little Book (Strunk and White.) That gets so many things wrong that it's pitiful.
England has its own authoritative usage manuals.
Xaltatun
Another US/UK apostrophic difference...
I've had occasional discussions with friends over the question of how "you all" is written.
As far as I know "you all" isn't used in the UK.
Being a Yankee by birth and inclination, I spell it out as two words, and I regard it as the second person plural.
Friends of a more Southern inclination tended to spell it ya'll and rejected y'all as a mispelling. They also took it to mean the second person singular, and used all ya'll as the second person plural. I tried to argue that y'all made more sense, since the apostrophe took the place of some missing letters, but no one paid any attention.
We all did agree that "yous" (a form of the second person plural which appears in parts of New York City) would not take an apostrophe, and that it was used in a polite way (such as when a Brooklyn waitress inquired "Are yous ready to order?"). We also agreed that "yous" was quite distinct from the more vulgar "youse".
y'all
Y'all or ya'll is Southern or Texas dialect, and usually is the second person plural. There are, however, lots of variations, including ya'll all for a second, more extensive plural and y'all for the singular and sometimes a polite variant.
The big problem is that, while it's a standard part of Southern dialect it's not taught in the schools in a standard way so there are lots of local variations.
You might want to refer to the Wikipedia article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Y%27all , which IMO seems to be pretty decent.
Xaltatun
All I can say is I'm glad I
All I can say is I'm glad I have an editor. All these rules are just confusing to a poor fellow that was never allowed to be in an English class growing up. :)