Thread: St Johns Wood or St John's Wood?
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Old July 1st 06, 02:32 PM posted to uk.railway,uk.transport.london,misc.transport.urban-transit
Phil Clark Phil Clark is offline
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Default St Johns Wood or St John's Wood?
On Thu, 29 Jun 2006 23:15:53 +0100, "John Rowland"
wrote:

Ned Carlson wrote:

What I'm wondering, is HTF did apostrophes get into the
English language, anyway? None of its ancestor/contributing
languages (Anglo-Saxon, Norse, French, Celtic) use or
used apostrophes, did they?

Modern Dutch uses apostrophes in the plural of certain (or all?) nouns
ending in a long single vowel, such as "2 taxi's" or "3 piano's".

So does English...

German uses the apostrophe for the possessive of personal nouns,
rather like english, eg Adolf's.

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