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Comment on How do you officially pronounce a possessive like: " Travis' "?

There’s a linguistics professor at MIT who I once heard say in a class (an Open Courseware class… I didn’t attend MIT or anything):

“We’ll speak no more of prescriptive linguistics except to mock it.”

However you want to say it, say it. Your particular style of speech is unique and beautiful and you should keep speaking that way.

I personally would pronounce it like “Travises”. As if pluralizing it. (“There are multiple Travises in the phone book.”) Makes it fairly clear. I guess that brings up the question what to do if there are multiple Travises who co-own something. “The Travises’ shared given name.” I think off the top of my head, I’d probably pronounce it like “Traviseses.” Cool!

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200ok@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
Recursive Travii

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- Meron35@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
  Travodes
  
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prole@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

“The Travises’ shared given name.” I think off the top of my head, I’d probably pronounce it like “Traviseses.”

I think the context in the quote is enough to know exactly what was meant without having to add an extra “es”

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- TootSweet@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
  I think if someone referred to “the Travises shared given name” without adding the extra “es”, my brain would get stuck on that for a bit. I don’t know that that would be the case for most people or not. But if someone were talking to me about the name shared by multiple people named “Travis”, my brain would churn less, get " stuck" for a shorter time, and be less likely to have to catch back up to the conversation if the extra “es” was included.
  
  Without the extra “es”, it feels like it could get a little “garden-path-y.” Like:
  
  “The Travis…”
  
  “The Travis” sounds like a pretty pretentious way to be referred to.
  
  "…es"
  
  Possessive. 'k. What does he have?
  
  "shared given name…"
  
  Oh, so “The Travis” was magnanimous enough to offer his name for consideration when it came time to decide the name of… maybe one of his relatives’ newborns…?
  
  Right? Not to say I wouldn’t expect to catch on in a couple more words there. And also more realistically, my brain wouldn’t be stuck on this interpretation in the conversation, but more “suspending judgement” and holding both possibilities for interpretations in mind until something resolved the question. But speaking just for myself, I think my brain would have to go through all those machinations if the extra “es” wasn’t there. And that requires more wetware cycles than if the extra “es” wad there. If it was, it’d be unambiguous immediately after the second “es” that “Travis” was both plural and possessive.
  
  (To be fair, after the second “es” another possibility would be that we were talking about multiple groups of people named “Travis”. Chapters of a club only open to people named “Travis” for instance. Kindof like the word “peoples” which is similarly “double-pluralized”. But it seems to me unlikely my brain would jump to that possibility the way it might jump to a possessive form of the title “The Travis.”)
  
  Also, it’s very possible my brain works differently than most. I think I have a pretty “stilted” manner of speech. People occasionally poke gentle fun at me about it. (All in good fun, mind you.) And it’s possible my brain doesn’t process speech quite like most people’s do.
  
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ALERT@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
I like how you find this “cool”, as a non-native speaker :D

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- TootSweet@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
  Right?!
  
  I’ve dabbled in learning Japanese enough to know that learning a second language as an adult has a way of driving home to you how little I really understand about my own native language. And learning what little I have of a second language definitely has taught me more about English.
  
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BallsandBayonets@lemmings.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
I would, at the least, desire to egg that MIT prof’s house. Language is about communication, and if everyone has their own rules there can be no communication. If you spell it Travis’ I’ll be asking you what a Travi is.

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- petrol_sniff_king@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
  And he and I can egg yours.
  Round and round it goes~…
  
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