From hambrosia@earthlink.net Mon Sep 4 07:16:27 2000 Received: from mxu4.u.washington.edu (mxu4.u.washington.edu [140.142.33.8]) by lists.u.washington.edu (8.9.3+UW00.05/8.9.3+UW99.09) with ESMTP id HAA42764 for ; Mon, 4 Sep 2000 07:16:27 -0700 Received: from hawk.prod.itd.earthlink.net (hawk.prod.itd.earthlink.net [207.217.120.22]) by mxu4.u.washington.edu (8.9.3+UW00.02/8.9.3+UW99.09) with ESMTP id HAA29857 for ; Mon, 4 Sep 2000 07:16:26 -0700 Received: from [38.32.21.160] (ip160.stamford13.ct.pub-ip.psi.net [38.32.21.160]) by hawk.prod.itd.earthlink.net (8.9.3-EL_1_3/8.9.3) with ESMTP id HAA24039 for ; Mon, 4 Sep 2000 07:16:23 -0700 (PDT) Mime-Version: 1.0 X-Sender: hambrosia@earthlink.net (Unverified) Message-Id: In-Reply-To: <200009040927.e849RwC02558@darwin.helios.nd.edu> References: <200009040927.e849RwC02558@darwin.helios.nd.edu> Date: Mon, 4 Sep 2000 10:17:31 -0400 To: classics@u.washington.edu From: Debra Hamel Subject: Re: punctuation Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" ; format="flowed" Thanks to the sporadically spouting Al Kriman for a very interesting note about punctuation and movable type. He writes, among other things: >Then again, as just illustrated, I'm one of those >troglodytes who omit the ess after an apostrophe mark only in forming >the possessive of a plural noun (and not in the possessive of just any >noun ending in ess). I regard the simplified rule as a conflation of >the rule for possessives of plurals with the rule for plurals of nouns >ending in certain sibilants. Of course, as we all know, these rules >are all rather recent. Which prompts me to ask: whence came the convention that the possessive of classical names is to be formed s' and not s's? (See Fowler's 3rd ed. s.v. "apostrophe" D3.) ----------- Debra Hamel eponymous@dhamel.com phone: 203-281-7594 38 Garfield Avenue http://www.dhamel.com fax: 630-604-3986 North Haven, CT 06473 ------------------------------------------------------------------- .