Why do we still have so many apostrophes in English?

The apostrophe has never been used to show two words shorted into one - it conveys there is a missing letter.

E.g. did not => didn’t [ie the ‘o’ is missing]

In the possessive form it ALSO indicates that a letter is missing. The possessive in old English was conveyed by added ‘es’ to a noun.

So “Johnes hat” would mean the hat belonging to John, now abbreviated to “John’s hat”. So yes, languages evolve and this is how English has evolved. You need to get over it and stop trying to dictate to English speakers how their language should function.

😂ov a'll the thing's to moan. about

I came on to say this. I think that Dutch uses more apostrophes than English.
They are used to indicate possession, to join two words to form a contraction, to make a plural of a foreign/ borrowed word, and even worse, sometimes words start with them.
Eg. 's ochtends - belonging to mornings.

People are pointing out that your grammar and punctuation appear to be poor, which rather undermines your argument as it seems that you want rid of punctuation because you can't use it properly.

Focusing on "im" for a moment - phonics immediately rules this out as an alternative for I'm, as does the fact that the personal pronoun "I" is always capitalised. This makes it clear that we are using the long "igh" instead of the short "i" sound. Removing the capital letter would really screw up kids learning to read and write simple vowel-consonant words. Also, it looks awful and hurts my eyes!

Whilst I agree predictive text/auto type "corrections" are a pain in the backside, that's an argument to improve those, not to totally change the English language! (Or for people to not be lazy when typing. It's not the 90s where you're limited to a certain number of characters in a text. They extend now!)

People have given you multiple explanations as to why punctuation matters, you just don't want to listen. You asked AIBU - the answer is loud and clear.

Pp - qest, qestion etc...just no!!!! They hurt my eyes almost as much as "im."

Edited, ironically, for a grammatical mistake. Also due to stupid predictive text "correcting" my punctuation.

No. Do you know which ones are unnecessary?

Languages evolve. Apostrophes are inconvenient, and add time to typing

Hardly that much time- this is what is going wrong in life, let’s get this done as quickly as possible- hence txt, coz, and the omission of necessary words!

Yes. Hope that helps!

So why didnt you ?

I agree with this.

Apologies then, I thought it was, and it was a fair cop!

Did you mean
isnt
?

I sympathise with people who are dyslexic, but for everyone else there is really no excuse for not knowing the difference between where and were and we're, or their, they're and there and things like that. It's primary school stuff.

If, as in the case in many other parts of the world, people are able to write and speak in fluent English from a young age, native English speakers should at least put some effort into abiding by basic grammar rules, too.

And personally, reading all the barely literate gibberish you see posted on social media, or messages from men on dating apps who can't string coherent sentences together, makes my eyes want to bleed.

We don't, really, they're just in some very commonly used words.

How come we use more than other languages do?

English really doesn't compared to languages that use apostrophes to represent glottal stops and similar breaks, and when it comes to transliterating some languages to Latin script, some end up very apostrophe heavy - like some of the recent attempts by the Kazakh government to move from the Cyrillic script to the Latin script used apostrophes to cover a lot of gaps.

Ah come on, I agreed with you that there were typos in that post. Not the others though.

Do we use them for contractions more than other languages? The French contract with apostrophes if the word begins with a vowel all the time (l'eau, d'il, j'aime, c'est, etc). Although of course their other contractions just make whole new words (a+le = au, a+les = aux) which seems far more difficult than a simple apostrophe.

Back to English if you got rid of the apostrophe then some contractions are the same as another word. She'd and she'd, we're and were, we'd and wed, she'll and shell. Keeping the apostrophe just makes sense.

I have fadas in my name and never bother using them. There's no point - nobody can pronounce my name properly anyway! The apostrophe is an integral part of the English language though. If we do this then what next? Do we abolish commas so things are made even easier simpler quicker and faster?

To be fair there were a couple of typos in that post, so on that occasion she had a point. Otherwise not.

'

I find it very distracting to read work emails and see errors with apostrophes being used in plurals. The eye is drawn to them. On some instances they are used in plurals but not many.

To be fair I don’t think you’re a great judge of what is or isn’t correct English.

I feel the same about the u that follow a q. There is always one so why don't we all agree that q is pronounced like qu then we will save letters. Qestion, Qest,