I doubt anybody gave much thought to the fact that when Biden dropped out of the 2024 presidential race that linguists and English teachers were about to be called on to explain a couple mysteries of the English language as she is written. Let me try to get ahead of the game.
Vice-presidential candidate-to-be is Tim Walz, from Minnesota. By some counts, nearly a third of Minnesotans have German ancestry, so it's not surprising the state's current governor should have a German family name. It is apparently the most common ancestry in the state and according to the World Population Review website, more than ten percent of Minnesotans over the age of five actually speak German at home, which I find really hard to believe in this day and age. But moving on...
Everybody knows what a waltz is - it's a dance where you go one-two-three, one-two-three, one-two three and people immediately think of Johann Strauss and the (beautiful) Blue Danube. So even though Tim Walz leaves the t out of his name, most people will want to pronounce it like the dance. But don't. His name got Americanized at some point and it is now pronounced walls, as in a room has a ceiling, a floor and four walls.
It's not that we can't say waltz. We may not have a letter for the sound of t and s (or t and z) put together like Hebrew does with the 18th letter of its alphabet צ, which the website "Hebrew for Christians" is happy to inform you is pronounced "like ts in nuts." Or the 21st letter of the Cyrillic alphabet ц, which does likewise. Japanese also has っ, but enough of this tangent. My point is Walz uses the English spelling pronunciation of z as in zebra and not the ts sound of the tse-tse fly.
And, for my fellow Germanophiles (für meine deutschbegeisterten Kollegen), let me acknowledge in passing that the German word for Waltz is not Waltz, but Walzer. The Beautiful Blue Danube Waltz is simply Der Donauwalzer. And note that the addition of a t wouldn't change the pronunciation. It's not there in German probably because it would be redundant. I have no idea why one got added in the English word waltz (assuming, perhaps mistakenly, that the German word came first), but because it was, we can now draw a distinction between waltz and Tim Walz that can't be made in German.
OK. Now for the second issue, where to put the apostrophe.
Historically, the apostrophe in English was used either to show a place in a word where a letter has been omitted, as in contractions such as don't for do not and couldn't for could not, or to mark the so-called "Saxon genitive," more commonly known as the possessive case of nouns as in Mary's lamb as opposed to the phrase the lamb of Mary, which is suggestive of a higher register such as biblical language. (Ever wonder why we say the Lamb of God and not God's Lamb?) There are two more usages of the single apostrophe, to mark a quotation within a quotation, or as an alternate to double quotation marks around a single word, but that's not relevant to the discussion here.
Where the plot thickens is where spoken English and written English part ways. The apostrophe-s flows freely in both written and spoken English in the sentence: "Mary had a little lamb, and oh look there's Mary's lamb right there!"
But what happens when the possessive comes on a word ending in an s or z or sh or ch (a "sibilant") sound? Mary has a little lamb and so does James. I see Mary's lamb but I don't see James's.
In this case, there is no problem. We have a name for this. It's called the epenthic schwa. A schwa is the sound we make when we're looking for a word and can't quite come up with it, a sound commonly written as "uh". "I'd like to, uh, maybe, uh, kind of, uh, get your permission to spend the night with your daughter." James's lamb is pronounced "James-zus lamb,"
Lost in the sands of time is the explanation for why we have an alternative in which we are all left to wonder how the wee little apostrophe got to not only play its stand-in role as an epenthic schwa but actually create another s-sound on the word as well: We can write this without the second s: James' lamb.
Here's where people go running to dictionaries and books on style, hoping to find an authority to tell them how to do this properly.
I'm not going to do that because my linguistics training has made me a descriptive linguist, and not a prescriptivist. I consider telling people what to do is not science; describing what people do is.
Problem is I'm also trained as an English teacher (i.e., as a "prescriptivist") and am a bit of a fussy queen to boot. I cringe whenever I see people confuse it's with its. All my linguistic training is for naught when I see a student composition with a sentence like, "The cherry tree in my front yard is so beautiful in the spring before it starts to lose it's blossoms." Or when I see an apostrophe used with plurals, as in, "This parking lot has room for fifty car's."
But back to James's lamb.
Consider the sentences "Henry James and his brother William live next door. I've known the James brothers all their lives." They pose no problem. But what about if the two brothers own a car in common? Is it the James car? The James' car? The James's car? Many will want to write this as the James' car and cite the grammatical rule that an apostrophe is used to mark plural possession.
I can't tell you what's right. I can't even tell you what most people do, although I'm sure somebody can, since we now have the ability to count no end of trivia to the last jot and tittle.
There. How nice to get back to fussing over language and language usage.
I'm looking forward to the Democratic Convention in Chicago when the Harrises come out (one of whom kept his bachelor name, Emhoff) with the Walzes (Walz'?) (Walz's) to the roar of the crowds.
It feels so good not to have to fight the depression that trumpism has spread across the land and to feel a bit of hope again. And freedom to turn my attention to things like punctuation instead of a possible loss of democracy.
P.S. (added Aug. 13) - I apologize for leaving the impression that the English word for waltz and the surname Walz both come from the same German origin. That is not the case. The surname is apparently a derivative from the name Walter, and the verb to waltz comes from the proto-germanic word walt- meaning to turn, revolve and only in the 18th century became applied to "that riotous and indecent German dance."
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