Quote:
Originally Posted by JD Gumby
Gotta love English grammar and its "rules," especially given that almost all other possessives not ending in "s" I know of ("their" being the only exception?) use the "'s" construct. It's not too surprising that it mixes up a lot of people.
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That's not grammar, it's spelling. Grammar develops organically in all languages and is the structure the speakers put words into to create meaning. Native speakers don't have to learn their language's grammar to speak it.
Spelling is a man-made way of representing words by using symbols. The symbols and other conventions are completely arbitrary, although one hopes for a certain amount of consistency in the application. (I.e., there's no reason that the symbol for "A" should be "A"; that's arbitrary. However, once that symbol has been chosen, it's best if it is used consistently for the "A" sound).
While I agree that one needs to learn that the word pronounced /its/ is spelled "it's" if it is a contraction and "it's" if it is a possessive, I wish that the people who settled on that rule had been paying more attention because it's a stupid rule. The usual way for indicating possession in English (in Germanic languages generally) is to add an /s/ sound to the end of the word doing the possessing. The conventional way of writing this in English is to use an apostrophe before the s.
But while the general rule is that we form the possessive by adding "'s" to the word, for whatever reason a few people decided that the way to show the possessive of "it" is to add an "s" without an apostrophe. And to make matters worse, there *is* a form of "it" that does use an apostrophe...but it's not the possessive. So - normal rule - use 's to indicate the possessive. "It" rule - use 's when you *don't* want the possessive, and use s-with-no-apostrophe with you *do* want the possessive. It's a dumb rule. (Doesn't mean we should ignore it, but it is dumb).
And there is no reason the convention couldn't have been to use "it's" for both words. There is no danger of confusion because that's the rule we use for regular nouns: "Tony's going to be late for dinner" or "Tony's dinner is late" are perfectly clear despite the use of the apostrophe in both cases. I can't think of any situation in which there would be confusion, in fact. Which shouldn't be surprising, really, since when we speak we don't pronounce the apostrophe anyway. We just say /its/ and people know what we mean.
But that train has left the station, so it's best to just follow the rules as laid down by our fathers and our father's fathers. And maybe our fathers' fathers. And not get into the even-more-fraught area of spelling generally.