[coldpie]

Most manuals of style say that "Sanders's" is most correct, but will allow for "Sanders'". I strongly prefer the former. It's logical if you think of it: s' is always for plural nouns that end in S, 's is always for singular. "The cats' milk" vs "James's hand." This way also matches pronunciation.

It gets tricky to keep straight when you have plural nouns that don't end in S. I know "Men's clothes" is correct. But I'm not sure what to do with fish. "The fish's pond"? "The fishes' pond"?

(In any case, just because a word ends in S does not mean it needs an apostrophe. Many, many English writers need this lessen pounded into their head. I lose brain cells every time I see someone write "want's".)

[r3bl]

Man, it's no wonder that people like me two aren't speaking English natively get confused about that whole *'s thing.

[Someone1234]

As a natively speaker let me just confirm: English is a very inconsistent language, where rules just as often result in doing the wrong thing as they do the right. Many native speakers get the 's/'/s/ies thing wrong, as well as two/too/to, and so on.

I feel bad for anyone learning this language.

[pilif]

> I feel bad for anyone learning this language.

clearly you have never tried out German :-)

As a German native speaker who generally has a lot of difficulty learning languages, I can assure you that English was a lot more feasible for me compared to anything else I tried.

(Of course you'll find an error in this comment - that is bound to happen in any comment talking about language mistakes)

[pluma]

I've heard a nice explanation of the difference between learning English and learning German:

The rules of English are relatively simple but there are a ton of exceptions that take a long time to get right and will give it away you're not a native speaker.

German doesn't have as many exceptions so you can easily reach near-native levels of fluency once you know all the rules, but there are far more rules you need to be aware of (and even then you'll need to keep track of grammatical gender).

In other words, you can learn German by simply following all the rules and memorizing the vocabulary, but it's far easier to do for English (where you'll miss a ton of exceptions if you only do that).

Let's just say I'm happy I'm a native German speaker already -- I probably couldn't be bothered to become as fluent in it as I'm in English as a second language.

[r3bl]

In my experience, German was a piece of cake. Sure, it's a bit difficult at first, but pronunciation is easy once you figure it out and the grammar is not that hard.

Dutch, on the other hand... :)

I've been trying for five or six months now to pronounce 'Groningen' right, but I never succeeded. If there's one 'g' in a word, I can pronounce it. If there are two letters 'g' in one word, it's practically impossible for me.

[p_eter_p]

"Scheveningen" is the one that stopped me in my tracks.

[ethbro]

The only quirk to me is using "much" to modify an adjective ("feasible"), which in my experience (admittedly southern American English) a native speaker would not choose to do.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Determiner (If you want to hate English slightly more :-) )

[ethbro]

Maybe it's the trauma from compiler design, but in times of multiple stylistic options in English I try to trend towards standardization / the more broadly applicable version.

Drop in the bucket, but my small part towards decreasing the number of exceptions.

Edit: and just personally, I try to mentally associate homophones (two/too/to) with another word that helps clarify them (e.g. too:also).

[coldpie]

Hey, at least we don't have goddamn gendered nouns. What an awful, awful idea that is.

[NoGravitas]

Or [noun classes][0] generally.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noun_class

[laumars]

The I Before E Except After C "rule" is another great example.

Obligatory QI citation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=duqlZXiIZqA

[brlewis]

English is ridiculously hard to get right. Witness the gp comment where someone who clearly thinks a lot about correctness has misspelled "lesson".

[pluma]

As a rule of thumb, if you attach "'s" to something ending with an "s", only attach the apostrophe. But there's no problem if you do it wrong, it's just a stylistic convention to reflect the phonetics.

And for plural "s": if the word normally ends in a "s" or "sh" or "z" sound (or possibly even "zh", i.e. the "j" in French "je") add an "es" instead of "s". Some words are irregular but irregular words by definition don't follow the rules.

The real confusion comes with possessive pronouns. It is "the boy's pet" but it is "his pet" (not #"he's pet"). They're not nouns (they're pro-nouns, i.e. something that is used instead of a noun) so the apostrophe-s rule doesn't apply to them, they just take on special forms.

The confusion really just stems from English regularly allowing contractions like "-'s"/"-'" for "is" and "-n't"/"-'t" for "not" or "-'d" for "would". Pronouns can have contractions as suffixes (e.g. "he's" for "he is" or "he'd" for "he would") but nouns normally can't (#"the boy'd" isn't normally permissible, at least not in writing).

It gets even worse if you consider that whether words can only be contracted additionally depends on their pronunciation (and role) within the sentence. You can't answer the question "Is he dead?" with #"He's.", for example.

Oh, and I haven't even touched upon similar-sounding but entirely different things like "their" vs "they're" -- and I even caught myself accidentally mixing them up while writing this comment.

[nilkn]

As coldpie mentioned above, your rule of thumb is definitely up for debate. I understand that one can't be overly prescriptive in grammar, but it's still very common to append "'s" to a word ending in "s" already to make it possessive, depending on context, and this is recommended in many modern style manuals.

[madeofpalk]

It is funny when we can't figure out how to spell using our own language :)

[dhimes]

That's not the problem. The problem is that his name is Sanders, not Sander.

[coldpie]

Well, yes. Sander's is right out. But that comes from a lack of understanding of how to make words-that-end-in-S into their possessive form, which is what I was addressing.

[dhimes]

It seems more likely that it came from not knowing his name. But it's fixed now, so whatevs.

[matthewmacleod]

"The fish's pond"? "The fishes' pond"?

That's a pond belonging to a single fish ("The fish's pond") versus one belonging to multiple fish ("The fishes' pond"). You're completely right!

[coldpie]

It's hard because the plural form of "fish" is usually "fish." I think we allow "fishes" when "fish" is ambiguous, like my example. Maybe we should just change to "fishes" all the time :)

[alex_young]

Deep in the weeds here, but the plural of a single species of fish is 'fish', while multiple species of fish are 'fishes'.

'Swimming with the fishes' means you must have wound up on the wrong side of a boat in a diverse body of water. It would be a shame to have to 'swim with the fish'. So ambiguous.

[coldpie]

Learn something new every day :)

[js2]

The plural "fish" is more than one fish of the same species. The plural "fishes" is multiple species. At least biologists make that distinction. edit: what Alex Young said.

[csn]

"Fishes" is the word used to describe different species of fish.

Edit: late for the party. "Deeres" and "sheepes" follow the same pattern, I presume.

[JoeAltmaier]

ITs not cut-and-dried. E.g. its vs it's is unsolvable - both should have the apostrophe but ambiguity.

[coldpie]

Mmh, not really. "Its" is consistent with other possessive pronouns like "his" and "hers". "It's" is consistent with other contractions, where letters are removed ("it is" or "it has").

[JoeAltmaier]

Can argue they should have the apostrophe too. Like Tom's or Roosevelt's. "Her's" Those just don't happen to be (very) ambiguous.

[a3n]

I was in Sears (where America used to shop) and saw "Mens clothes".