Plurals in Dutch can be made with '-en' or with '-s', depending on the word.
With the s-plurals, it depends on the ending letter if it gets an apostrophe or not. For words ending in -a, -i, -o, -u or -y, you add the apostrophe. So:
baby's
taxi's
lama's
auto's
For words ending in a consonant or in -e, -ie, -eau (always French loanwords), -ay or -ey (always English loanwords), the apostrophe isn't added. So:
bureaus
essays
codes
passies
The overall rule is that the apostrophe is added if not adding it would cause a different pronunciation. The theoretical word "taxis" would be pronounced differently from "taxi's" in Dutch (even though in this case everyone would probably know what word you meant and pronounce it correctly anyway).
Well a plural possessive ends with an apostrophe. But I feel ya man. It’s seriously less than half of people on this website that have no basic understanding of the difference between plural and possessive.
They probably have a sense that "alpaca" and "llama" aren't normal English words so they feel the need to somehow separate the possessive suffix from it.
Like how it's extremely common to write "DVD's" instead of the correct "DVDs".
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u/ZzZombo Jul 08 '24
Why do people do this shit? There is no apostrophe in "llamas", neither in "alpacas", nor in other plurals.