Poll re: English plural form's

General discussion about learning languages

How is the plural of “word” correctly written in current English?

Poll ended at Fri Aug 30, 2019 4:20 pm

"words"
36
78%
"word's"
1
2%
both "words" and "word's"
0
No votes
whatever manner in which native English speakers write it is thereby necessarily correct, so "words" "word's" and "wurds" are all correctly written
1
2%
I decline to select one of the above options, as I sense this is just a prelude to a rant by the OP, to be followed by an unproductive forum war between prescriptivists and descriptivist's.
8
17%
 
Total votes: 46

AnthonyLauder
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Re: Poll re: English plural form's

Postby AnthonyLauder » Thu Aug 22, 2019 1:36 pm

SCMT wrote:I don't know what a "descriptivist" is, but words is the correct plural form of word and word's is not.

The apostrophe in word's denotes possession, such as in "the word's spelling is unusual," or possibly some unusual truncation of "word is."


But, word's is the plural of word' ;)
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Querneus
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Re: Poll re: English plural form's

Postby Querneus » Fri Aug 23, 2019 12:52 am

The main problem of the poll that causes prescriptivist-descriptivist polarization is that it refers to correctness in English without defining what is meant by correctness.

Descriptivists do have a notion of prescritivist-style correctness. They just refer to it by other adjectives such as "normative" or "standard" instead of using "correct". For descriptivists, the notion of commonness of occurrence, particularly among native speakers (of any level of education), is what is most relevant. In the end, when something is "ungrammatical/unattested/semantically incoherent/infelicitous", what is really meant is that the thing is unlikely to be uttered by a native speaker.

"Words" is naturally a lot more normative than "word's" or "wurds", in fact it's the only normative choice. However, even a full-on prescriptivist would allow "word's" or "wurds" to be printed in a book as long as such spellings are used rhetorically in context. Imagine the author of a book of children's literature writing "wurds" in order to portray that a child is beginning to learn to write, or portray the rebelliousness of some naughty brats.
badger wrote:if you want a rant on the misuse of apostropes, I find the use of the dangling possessive apostrophe on words ending in "s" but which aren't plurals even more irritating - eg "James' book".

It's not always a "misuse" even from a prescriptivist point of view. Many styleguides recommend doing that for ancient Greek, ancient Roman and ancient Middle Eastern names ending in -s, e.g. "Plautus' comedies" (presumably this also applies to Chinese philosophers "Confucius" and "Mencius"). This idea seems particularly stronger in the case of "Jesus", e.g. "Jesus' parables", to the point I've sometimes heard random lay people (not styleguides) say that "Jesus" is the one exception.
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