Anna On Chris' Shoulder
Just a very quick post here; Anna is on my shoulder, in the front garden of Irina’s parent’s house. Hmmm, I need to double check my apostrophe use there, I’m never sure if that is the correct way to indicate ‘possession’ twice in a row. Anyway, this picture was taken on the 23rd June. You can’t see her teeth yet, but today she munched on her first bits of food! I may break with previous predictions, and try to post that photo soon 🙂
August 10th, 2009 5:06 pm
Apostrophes and possession…Irina’s parents = the parents(plural) belonging to Irina(singular). Irina’s parents’ garden = The garden (sing) belonging to the parents (pl) belonging to Irina (sing) By contrast Irina’s parent’s garden would be the garden belonging to the parent (SINGULAR) belonging to Irina (sing) ………..so, basically an apostrophe after an ‘s’ usually means the noun is plural and before the ‘s’ usually means the noun is singular………..except where the singular noun ends in an ‘s’ when the apostrophe goes immediately after the ‘s’ eg Jess’ garden or James’ life. Yes, I know. Even official things get it wrong and you will see things like St James’s Place in Cheltenham but it is wrong and it looks awful!! OK. I’ll get down off my grammatical pedestal now xxx
August 10th, 2009 8:57 pm
If I am allowed: is “Jess’ garden” pronounced /’d?esiz ga:dn/ or /d?es ga:dn/?
August 10th, 2009 8:59 pm
Question mark was supposed to be http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiced_postalveolar_fricative
Chris, what’s wrong with your db encoding? 😉
August 10th, 2009 10:03 pm
…now why did I know that was going to be Oleg?!! Colloquially it would be said as ‘Jessiz’ garden always. Technically….hmmmm …. well I have heard BBC news presenters say both though the equivalent of ‘Jessiz’ always sounds awkward and clumsy. I suspect it is better to turn the sentence around so that there is no genitive ‘s’ anywhere eg in the garden which Jess owns
Hope that helps
Carol
August 11th, 2009 1:40 am
For those of us who have been living in Swansea too long, where the “zzz” sound is added to everything, this is all very confusing. I’sz do’sz not understands’sz! On the other hand, it may just be the drink.
August 12th, 2009 6:19 pm
@Mum – The mistake in the post with parent’s vs. parents’ would explain why it didn’t look right at the time, thanks for the explanation. Already had an e-mail from a fellow ex-Pates person, who thought that apostrophes were only ever used for indicating contraction of word(s), and not to indicate possession! I hadn’t realised the plural possession doesn’t ever involve an extra s on the end – I’d thought (maybe even be taught??) that both Chris’ Chris’s could be used. Learn something new everyday 🙂
@Oleg – re. db encoding – same as before. Due to the initial WP install being non-manual (Fantastico I think), I never noticed anything wrong with the MySQL setup. It defined Latin1 I think), rather than UTF-8, even though data was stored in UTF-8. Something mildly complicated, not super easy to fix, which means that anything interesting, character wise, is dumped out as a ? Maybe you can help me come up with a solution when we next meet 🙂
@John – You sound like someone from deepest darkest rural Cirencester there 🙂