punctuation - What proposals have been made to give the apostrophe some relief?


The apostrophe has a lot of jobs.



  • It makes things possessive,

  • it indicates the omissions of letters in contractions and numbers in dates,

  • it is used to indicate strange accents in dialog, and

  • it indicates plurals of words and letters.


To complicate matters, it looks almost or exactly the same as the single-quote in many fonts and in handwriting.


I have read of proposals to use a distinct mark of punctuation for each task. What are some of these proposals?




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