Weird Punctuation Decisions

[deird_lj]

I’ve been corrected in the comments to my last post for pluralising “Mary-Sue” incorrectly.

And while part of me wants to wave my editing course in people’s faces and go “I know better than anyone! Hah!” and another part of me wants to change it so that people won’t think I am bad at punctuation, I thought it might be more interesting to make a post about it – because I’m obsessed with language, and find this stuff far too fascinating.


Yes, I did check my textbooks before posting. And they… disagreed.

Let’s look at a boring and normal name.

Mark

Original word: Mark
Possessive form: Mark’s (as in “This is Mark’s hat.”)
Plural form: well, it’d be “Marks”, right? After all, simple English plurals are made by sticking an S on the end – that’s really all that has to be done.

Which would be all well and good – if all names were names like Mark, Luke, and Katherine.


However…

Louis

This one already has enough debate over the possessive form. (Is it “Louis’s hat”, or “Louis’ hat”? No-one’s quite sure.) Add in the possibility of more than one Louis, and there’s a whole new issue.

If there are five people called Louis in one room, are they the “five Louis”, or “five Louises”, or “five Louiss”?


Buffy

If Buffy clones herself, are there “two Buffys”, or “two Buffies”?
(Jane Espenson prefers Buffies.)


Henry

Has England had “eight King Henrys”, “eight King Henries”, or “eight Kings Henry”?



My textbooks disagree. One recommends a different style for each name – “Marks”, “Louis’s”, “Buffys”, and “Kings Henry”, respectively – one says “do whatever you want, just be consistent”, and one says to use apostrophes: “three Mark’s, five Louis’s, two Buffy’s, and eight King Henry’s”.

I decided to go the apostrophe-adding route, even though I knew it would look like I was mixing it up with possessives.




So: was I right? Or wrong? Or should I have done something completely different?
Tell me in the comments!

Comments

[stormwreath.livejournal.com]

Here's what I do:

An apostrophe stands for a missing letter or letters. In old English, the genetive case was formed by adding -es to the end of a word: "the book of Mark" would be written as "Markes book". Modern English misses out the 'e' sound, and so the word is shortened to Mark's instead of Markes.

As such, I never include an apostrophe to mark a plural. Not only is it, I submit, incorrect, it's also confusing because it can be mistaken for a possessive. (I'm generally a descriptivist, not a prescriptivist, when it comes to grammar; but something can still be "wrong" in a language if it prevents people communicating their meanings effectively.)

So:
80s not 80's
The As and the Bs, not the A's and the B's.


I would write the plural of Louis (French pronunciation, /'lu:ɪ/) as Louis (pronounced /'lu:ɪz/), although for clarity I might reword the sentence to make it clear it's a plural. If you pronounced it as an English name, sounding the final 's' in the singular, then the plural would be 'Louises' - but because that sounds like the plural of the girl's name Louise, I'd probably try to reword the sentence.

Technically, I'd say the plural of "buffy" would be "buffies", but when it's a proper name I'd pluralise Buffy as Buffys, just because that feels more respectful.

The plural of King Henry is King Henrys, because 'Henry' is a proper noun, not an adjective. While it's fun to pluralise expressions like 'Lords Appellant' or 'Courts Martial' or 'Advocates General', those are simply a case of putting the adjective after the noun instead of before it in imitation of mediaeval French practice. A court martial is a martial court, an advocate general is a general advocate; but king Henry isn't a henry king. :-)

I tend to add 's to proper names ending in -s to denote the possessive, because thaty's also how I pronounce them. Giles's book, because I'd pronounce that /'dʒaɪlzəz 'bʊk/ not /'dʒaɪlz 'bʊk/.