grammar - Are apostrophes actually needed?


I don't mean to make it grammatically correct I mean does English need them?


I can't seem to find a use case other than it's "legacy" in English, but that is never a reason to keep something around.


For example, would there ever be a confusion of "hell" and "he'll"? What about "theyll" or "they'll" or "he's" and "hes".


A friend brought up this use case:



Tim: "How do I get up there?"
Rodney: { "Well think." | "We'll think." }



Except that is even flawed because technically "well" in the first example needs a comma after like:



Rodney: { "Well, think." | "We'll think." }



This would clear this confusion up.


I saw killtheapostrophe.com years ago and it got me thinking and so I brought it up with my grandmother, who has a Ph. D. in linguistics, and she agrees with him, however it got brought up again on Twitter and I was curious what others who love linguistics think about it.




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