Kesshin wrote: ↑08 Jul 2024 23:19
Today I saw an official government sign pluralize the word "semi"(as in "semi truck") as "semi's" in a sign saying "No Semi's".
My personal grammar radar says this is incorrect, but it has become a trend recently as more and more people pluralize things with a "apostrophe s". I originally thought it was just due to the horrible American school system, but this is a street sign, hopefully written by adults. This might be deeper than I thought.
The apostrophe was originally used to indicate the elision of letters that were no longer pronounced (or never had been).
Cates (genitive),
walked and
shall not were respelled
cat's,
walk'd and
sha'n't.
At the same time, spelling rules for plurals became confusing when applied to foreign words ending in vowels. Writing "potatos" made it look as though the final "o" was meant to be short. But writing "potatoes" made it round as though there were an 'e' sound in it, which there wasn't (and also made it look like the singular should be 'potatoe'). So the solution everyone decided one was a rule that words ending in vowels were spelled with apostrophes in the plural: potato's, tomato's, hello's, apostrophe's, etc, to indicated that a vowel letter was logically present (making the final vowel long) but not actually pronounced.
This then spread into a rule that plurals should have apostrophes whenever the word seemed odd or would look strange with an -s stuck on it.
At some point in the 19th century, pedants fixated on the idea that one of the things apostrophes were used for was genitives, and decided that they should ONLY be used for genitives. So since then apostrophes anywhere other than in genitives have gradually been removed: not only do we now write "potatoes" rather than "potato's", we now write "Ps and Qs" instead of "p's and q's", "1970s" instead of "1970's", "bosun" instead of "bo's'n" and so on.
Meanwhile, the general population didn't get the message, and instead expanded use of the apostrophe to ALL plurals. This became known in the 20th century as the "grocer's apostrophe", because of the way that shopkeepers would advertise "apple's" and "carrot's" on sale. This was the norm for the working and lower middle class, at least in Britain, until probably WWII.
Only in the last few generations has the rule that apostrophes should be used in, and only in, genitives really become the norm, and it's still frequently violated. Indeed, hypercorrection appears to be driving out the apostrophe entirely now - many governments don't allow it on signs, some companies don't allow it, etc. Eventually it'll be extinct entirely.
But your person who wrote "semi's" is just using the apostrophe in the same way it has continually been used since at least the 18th century: marking the plural of a foreign word (in this case probably because "semies" both makes the first vowel look long and makes the word as a whole look like the plural of "semy").
It's not a "recent change" at all. Indeed, a century ago most people outside of universities and major newspapers and publishing companies wouldn't have blinked at it.
Another trend I'm seeing is that more and more people are making a kind of glottal stop noise before things like "I"(and it's homophones) or "an". Is this just a slight stutter?
Any time two vowels follow in sequence without turning into a diphthong, there'll be some sort of glottal stop between them - people don't actually just stop breathing for a moment. These stops are also inevitable utterance-initially (when they're really releases more than stops). Strengthening of the stop may be dialectical, or emphatic. I very much doubt it's "recent", since the stops are generally even stronger in other Germanic languages.
Personally, I don't tend to use many glottal stops in hiatus, because all the low vowels are instead given linking R, because of the comma-letter merger.
People also seem to replace /t/ sounds with [ʔ].
Yes, literally every native speaker from the UK or US does this, to different extents. For the last 30 years or so, even the royal family and prime ministers have done this even in official broadcasts.
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