this post was submitted on 23 Jun 2024
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I wonder how much of a brain is needed to tell it's from its.
Quite a big one actually, natural language processing is very difficult. It took until the past couple years to solve that one properly. There is a reason only humans have a complex language.
Having the same sound be spelled two different ways is a flaw of the writing system. The spoken word is always the real language in linguistic terms. If the writing system is hard to understand or to use then it's a bad system. Hangul is much better from what I understand, as it always reflects the way something is pronounced.
None of us here have invented the rules of the English language (or, for that matter, any other language). But once these rules are given, let’s try to use them as best as we can.
I refuse to believe that distinguishing between "its" and "it's" is complicated (you just need to know that "it's" is a contraction of "it is"). Rather, I believe that most people simply don't want to take their 0.01 seconds to think of the correct case: "I'll be understood just the same."
Or in other words: I'm sure that if you gave a prize of, say, $100 to a group of people for correctly placing "its/it's" in a hundred sentences, more than 90% would do it correctly in all of them.
From my point of view, the number of times "its/it's" is written incorrectly does not measure how difficult the English language is but rather the number of people who bother to try to write it correctly.
Nah its/it's actually trips me up a lot because 'its' is an exception to the possessive apostrophe rule. What really gets me is seeing someone use a possessive apostrophe on a plural s. That is inexcusable.
But what about “its” that does show possession? Do you use an apostrophe there?
Example: a dog and its(?) tail.
No, I'm fairly certain you would not use an apostrophe there. That's what trips me up though because, at least in my mind, 'it' takes the place of the possessive noun in that clause and therefore it should have an apostrophe. but god forbid the spelling remain consistent between the two 🙄
That’s what I was thinking too; that ‘it’ is clearly referencing the dog and is therefore possessive. English is so weird lol