See this headline: proper usage, but difficult to parse. “It’s” = “it is”, exclusively. The origin of this “exception” rule?
In: 6
The word “its” is a possessive pronoun, the same as “his” and “hers”. The rule for using apostrophes only applies to nouns, not pronouns.
English is a mess of a language, with nearly every rule having an exception.
In this case, you have identified why – “it’s” is already a word meaning “it is” – a non-possessive contraction. To avoid confusion, we created an exception to the possessive apostrophe rule for “its”
“Its” when used as a possessive isn’t a proper noun and requires no apostrophe just like his, hers, or theirs. “It’s” is a contraction of “it is” requiring an apostrophe.
“Its” indicating possession without an apostrophe can also be seen in other possessive pronouns (e.g. hers, his, ours, theirs, yours).
Apostrophe is used in English to indicate possession *and* contraction.
In this particular instance you have a conflict between the possessive “it owns” and the contraction “it is” and need to make a decision about which one will defy the rules for the sake of written clarity.
Conflicts like this arise because languages developed independent of written rules. Literacy rates were very low and spellings and grammatical rules were very much in flux during the 15th and 16th centuries when the language you know as “English” really became the modern version.
For someone who can’t read, this spelling/structure conflict is meaningless.
Historically, “it’s” was used as both the possessive *and* the contraction. But this lends itself to confusion and the lack of apostrophe in other personal pronouns (yours, theirs, his, hers, etc.) meant that the apostrophe was dropped for the possessive form of its and retained for the contraction.
Look at it from a different perspective. The words it’s, how’s, what’s, and that’s seem to follow the same rule here
I was hoping for some insight about when and how this became “codified”. Reciting back that the bird is assigned the name “wattled starling” still tells us nothing about the bird.
Perhaps we might ponder backwards to if spoken English ever had a time where “it is” wasn’t slurred into one contraction…
The “official” answer tends to be that it’s because “it” and “its” are pronouns, while “table” and “table’s” are nouns. This is a reasonable way of remembering the rule, but it doesn’t explain why.
The answer is that English is just totally irregular, with a veneer of regularity added by people in the last couple of centuries because they like math and Latin, and think English should be more like math and Latin. These so-called rules are often conceived wrongly, but schoolteachers have loved them, so here we are.
Apostrophes are a fairly recent invention compared to the age of the language itself, and their use has changed a lot. And obviously they are completely unnecessary for comprehension. We do just fine speaking without them. My advice when seeing a rule that is inconsistent in English is just to understand it’s a naturally evolving language, do your best to follow the rules so that pedants don’t throw out your job applications, and worry about something more important, like why is a raven like a writing desk.
Latest Answers