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Comment by fbdab103 | Hacker News Reader

  When the name ends in an "s", you either add an apostrophe and "s" or just an apostrophe.

  - James's pen or James' pen
  - Mr Jones's van or Mr Jones' van

Who accepts the first style? I thought this was a non-negotiable error.

Edit: American

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I only accept the first style, because I pronounce it "Jameses pen", not "James pen". If there are multiple choices and one more closely resembles the spoken language, I don't see any reason to save a written letter. Otherwise you have "James' pen" being pronounced "Jameses pen", but "the voters' choice" for some reason is not pronounced "the voterses choice". You end up with one specific circumstance where an apostrophe is actually pronounced, and I really don't like that.

I'm also American.

I don't add the extra s, nor do I speak it aloud. Also American (western).

So you'd pronounce "I have James' pen" as "I have James pen"?

I do. It's rare to be confusing.

And if it were, I would not do Jameses, I would go traditional and say James his pen (since 's is a contraction of his)

It's not a contraction. It's a possessive, and specifically not a contraction of "James his".

As I had read that it was, I went searching for more authority and it looks like it was and it wasn't as best I can try to figure out from this article

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/His_genitive

I thought about this for a bit a month or two back. I decided that I was consistent about my spelling matching my pronunciation (though a -s’ one still entails a very subtle adjustment of the final phoneme compared to its -s origin), but I couldn’t find any consistent rule I was following about the pronunciation. Number of syllables was readily falsified; concluding phoneme (/s/ like Chris or /z/ like James) was readily falsified; I didn’t delve far enough into the concluding syllable (e.g. “Jesus’” already ends in /zəz/, ending in /zəzəz/ just makes me think of Sméagol and his fisheses), so there may still be a pattern, but for now I think it may just be irregular.

Pronunciation-dependent spelling is not novel in English: “a” and “an” are the same word, but the choice depends on the succeeding phoneme. The King James Version of the Bible uses the phrase “an horse for an hundred pieces of silver”, showing that the dominant accent at the time used a silent h in both words: “an ’orse for an ’undred pieces of silver”. I contemplated the matter a few years ago and decided that “a horse for a hundred pieces of silver” was a more reasonable reading of the phrase in Australian English (though most will diligently read the clumsy “an horse, &c.”).

This is one of the subtleties across accents. An American might write “an herb” because they’ll pronounce it “an ’erb”, whereas an Australian would write “a herb” because we sound the h.

The variations of "an h-" are one of my favorite things to stumble on, because it's one of the few times that the written word tells you what kind of accent the writer has.

Can also be seen with SQL. As in e.g. "a/an SQL injection attack"

I was taught the former. You'd pronounce the "'s" if you were speaking it, rather than saying "Mr Jones van" or "James pen".

The rule is there to eliminate a 3rd -s noise. James's is fine. Moses's or Jesus's is less so (but you can do it if you want).

In the UK I would say the latter is incorrect and would never use it in writing.

Wait, you don't think "James'" is acceptable at all? What about "Jesus'", which is pretty common as an affected archaism?

AP (usually), Chicago, and The Economist style guides all specify the first use for singular nouns--so it does seem to be officially preferred in both US and British English. Which I did not actually know.

These are definitely both acceptable.

In fact I'd go so far as to say that the apostrophe-only style ("James'") is somewhat archaic and definitely out of fashion.

Everyone who was taught s' is only for plural words.

I use s’ and it’s one of the more frequent corrections suggested to me, but that’s what was taught to me in grade and high school.

Both AP (usually--unless the following word starts with an s) and Chicago prefer s-apostrophe-s for singular nouns. Though, on their website, Chicago seems fairly ambivalent about it. The bottom line is that a copyeditor may correct you but it's pretty far away from grammatical faux pas territory. (Personally I go with just s-apostrophe.)

Thanks for bringing this up. I usually wonder which of the styles is correct..

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