Maybe you saw the news item about the Birmingham, England, City Council deprecating the use of the apostrophe in road signs. (If you missed it, the most recent
Language Log post on the topic has links to earlier discussions, which, in turn, have links to the original news item.)
The council’s action should not have been news, of course, least of all in the US. The US Board of Geographic Names made the same decision in 1890, and the postal system dropped apostrophes from virtually all place names when they introduced their earliest optical scanning equipment in the 1960s. This has had the unfortunate consequence of giving us names like Fishs Eddy, New York, but it’s easier to get people to write something a new way than to change what they call it in conversation, and Fish Eddy (or Pike Peak) would not have done at all. Such a change has been tried in the medical field; but whereas journal style is Down syndrome or Alzheimer disease (on the theory that Down and Alzheimer discovered but did not suffer from the eponymous conditions), doctors in conversation, just like laypeople, call them Down’s syndrome and Alzheimer’s.
Except that there are no apostrophes in conversation. What people say (pardon me for not rendering this in the International Phonetic Alphabet, but that would be beside the point) sounds like Downs and Alzheimers.
So what’s the deal with the apostrophe as a marker of possession anyway? Well, it’s standard in English, and an editor would be a fool to abuse it. But that’s the short view. The long view is that, as with many other niggling details of English, the use of the apostrophe to mark possession is something that has waned and waxed over the centuries. Our pronouns (see the title of this post) are among the oldest words in English (as in any language), and they don’t need no steenkin’ apostrophes, do they?
All of this has nothin’ to do with the use of apostrophes to mark elision. That’s somethin’ that seems likely to persist for a long time.
But I do sometimes wonder if two hundred years from now, the genitive will be written the same as it is today—in Fishs Eddy or elsewhere.
And the apostrophe isn’t the only endangered punctuation mark. Quotation marks are under attack in modern fiction. Hyphens are in retreat everywhere. The semicolon, even though old fogies like me know how to use it, gets a lot of bad press. And the question mark—who needs it. If the structure of the sentence makes it a question, why add a redundant mark. See how that works. You didn’t have any trouble reading the last three sentences (or this one) as questions, did you. I won’t speculate on which of these endangered marks will bite the dust first. Certainly the answer won’t be known in my lifetime or yours. But it’s interesting to think about in the context of the many ways both languages and writing systems change over time.