> it's not even accepted colloquially in spoken English
How the hell would you hear the apostrophe in "spoken English"?
How the hell would you hear the apostrophe in "spoken English"?
(My personal prediction: give it 100 to 200 years and we're going to drop the trailing 's' in all these cases. "Cat'" will just be pronounced "cats" and understood to mean "an adjective indicating the noun is owned by the cat").
"Thomas's" means "belongs to Thomas". Pronounced the same, but spelled differently, because it is a different word.