What always confused me was that "its" is meant to denote possession.
For example, I find this to be more consistent.
Bob's purpose vs. It's purpose
For consistency, shouldn't we use: Bobs purpose
Bob's purpose vs. It's purpose
For consistency, shouldn't we use: Bobs purpose
Generally, nouns can go from the nominative (subjective) case to the independent genitive (possessive) case by adding an apostrophe. If a word ends in "s", then the apostrophe goes after that "s". If the word does not end in "s", then you add an apostrophe, followed by an "s" after the end of the word.
A pronoun is treated differently than a proper or common noun when being used in its genitive case. Pronouns have declension (inflection) that can change their endings so they become different words.
For example, we can decline the pronouns to show possession using any of these cases:
Accusative (objective) case / Possessive Adjective case / Genitive (possessive) case
me / my / mine
you / your / yours
it / its / its
her / her / hers
him / his / his
us / our / ours
them / their / theirs
Case 1.* "The dog belongs to _"
Case 2. "This is _ dog".
Case 3. "That dog is _".
In all of these cases, a pronoun does not take an apostrophe, unlike you would see with common/proper nouns.
Note that this can apply to more than just the noun, in the case of "The Queen of England's dress", where Queen does not take the
Funnily enough, if their name was Bobs then the possessive would be Bobs', but you'll see natives use Bobs's and even say "Bobses" (Gollum like) as it's confusing even for us. That kind of consistency isn't a strength of the language, and the education system is failing too many people (that's a whole other discussion).
Actually, no; s’ is for possessives of plural nouns ending in s (well, an s or z sound, which might be an s, x, or z, but usually for a plural will be an s, and most plurals ending with s won't have it silent, but...); plural nouns not ending in s or singular nouns, including those ending in s, get ’s.
Except for the special rules for classical and Biblical names, where then the number of syllables in the base name (which then makes the s or z sound rule more interesting, because names ending with silent s, x, or z are a thing) becomes relevant because English.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/what-happens-t...
> as it's confusing even for us.
True, that.
Those style guides also mention many more special cases, like "the students' questions" (but "the dutchess's hat", because students is plural and dutchess is singular) and even break that down to the case where the next word starts with s, like "the dutchess' style".
Basically, it is not by any means clear cut.