The apostrophe
A neglected and misunderstood reading aid

- English abstract (PDF, 36 kB, at the workshop's homepage, for Acrobat Reader 5)
- English abstract (at the journal's homepage)
- English abstract (below)
- vgl. den Vortrag "Apostroph, der, -s, -e: Trennzeichen (früher 'Auslassungszeichen' genannt)"

Der Apostroph steht immer an der Morphemgrenze. © 2002 by Ruth Metzner

While the linguistic function of letters is always language-specific, the punctuation marks and the principles of their use are similar across a wide range of writing systems and scripts. Proceeding from this observation, I will attempt a comparative analysis of the apostrophe - a grapheme that has hardly ever been thoroughly treated by linguists¹ and tends to be forgotten². On this weak scientific basis it is usually assumed that the basic (or even the only) function of the apostrophe is to indicate the omission of letters (as in English it's for it is, German in'n for in den 'in the', French j'ai for *je ai 'I have', Italian l'albero for *lo albero 'the tree'). Consequently, a fervent battle is fought against orthographic mistakes in which an apostrophe is placed where it does not belong because 'there's nothing missing.'³ However, in most languages the apostrophe is also used in situations that do not conform to this definition, e.g.:

• in the possessive case (e.g. English John's father)
• in the plural of letters and figures (i.e. non-words, e.g. English two l's)
• in the plural of nouns ending in a vowel (e.g. Dutch auto's 'cars')
• in morphologically complex forms of foreign words (e.g. Polish Harry'ego, 'Harry's, gen. sg.', Russian <laptop'ov> 'of laptops, gen. pl.')
• in morphologically complex forms of proper names (e.g. Turkish Ankara'da 'in Ankara, loc. sg.', Ecevit'e 'to Ecevit, dat. sg.')

At first glance, these cases do not seem to have anything in common. While orthographies explain all apostrophes as marking omission that can be treated as such, they have to regard all the above cases as exceptions. So far only few linguists have agreed that the separating function of the apostrophe is becoming more and more important⁴, but it is generally assumed that it has developed from the function of elision. This is not true. Almost all apostrophes commonly explained as indicating omission can also be explained as marking morpheme boundaries. No apostrophes that do not mark boundaries do occur at all in the earliest texts and in modern formal texts.

Consequently, the apostrophe ought to be defined as having as its one dominant function the indication of morpheme boundaries where for certain reasons this seems necessary. One of these reasons that trigger the basic function of the apostrophe is an unusual graphic shape of a morpheme due to the elision of letters. I will show that this view of the apostrophe is less redundant, more in accord with linguistic intuition and historically more adequate than current definitions.

The function to indicate morpheme boundaries covers not only the cases where the apostrophe is used according to the existing orthographic rules. Even most of the popular misspellings can be explained by the intuitive wish to facilitate the reading process by marking a crucial morpheme boundary, e.g. German Häus'chen for Häuschen 'small house' (which can be read as */"hOY.S@n/ instead of /"hOYs.C@n/), das fit'e Sportstudio for das fitte Sportstudio 'the fit sports studio' (where the foreign word fit is hard to recognize because of its <tt>).⁵

Furthermore, the apostrophe, which was borrowed into the Latin alphabet from Greek, seems to have indicated a boundary rather than an omission from the start. From this point of view, the Greek punctuation marks can be seen as a very regular system including four syngraphemes marking boundaries at different linguistic levels: two dots (period <.> and [semi]colon <·>) and two strokes (comma <,> and apostrophe <'>). Although the Cyrillic apostrophe (e.g. in Ukrainian) has a completely different origin, it fulfills the same function as the 'western' apostrophe.

The misunderstanding of the apostrophe as a symbol of elision is symptomatic of the wide-spread ideas about the reading process. While the traditional view is that letters simply represent sounds, the relationship between written language, spoken language, and meaning seems in fact to be more complex. If reading involved the phonological recoding of the written text, then it would be important to indicate sounds missing in the chain of letters. If, however, the central aim of reading - the semantic decoding of the written text - can be achieved without phonological recoding, then the morphological structure of the text is substantial. This is what the apostrophe helps the reader to seize more quickly.