Dear editor, Yes, that one is confusing usage. I got clarity on this anguish while doing English text books in Macmillan. The apostrophe always denotes missing letters. So it denotes the missing ‘i’ in ‘it’s’ which stands for ‘it is’. Like what’s, they’d, who’s (who is), etc. However, the quirkiness of the language comes to fore when we don’t use the apostrophe for the genitive ‘its’. We don’t do it other cases too when a genitive is marked on the pronoun, for example, hers, his, ours.
Dear editor,
ReplyDeleteYes, that one is confusing usage. I got clarity on this anguish while doing English text books in Macmillan. The apostrophe always denotes missing letters. So it denotes the missing ‘i’ in ‘it’s’ which stands for ‘it is’. Like what’s, they’d, who’s (who is), etc. However, the quirkiness of the language comes to fore when we don’t use the apostrophe for the genitive ‘its’. We don’t do it other cases too when a genitive is marked on the pronoun, for example, hers, his, ours.