St Johns Wood or St John's Wood?
 

Ned Carlson wrote:
wrote:

Where there is some discussion is if the given name already ends with S.

Eg JAMES'S PALACE
or JAMES' PALACE

But never JAMES PALACE

Can't agree on that. It's a palace or court named for St. James,
not possessed by St. James. Apostrophe indicates possession.
Ambassadors to Britain are appointed to the Court of Saint James, not
Saint James' Court. However, the official royal website calls the
palace, St. James's Palace.

Sorry, Ned, but if your analogy were correct, then St. Paul's Cathedral
would be St. Pauls Cathedral and, to go right back to the original
subject of this thread, the woods concerned were no more possessed by
St. John than the Palace possessed by St. James or the Cathedral
possessed by St. Paul!

In this sense, that the wood / street / catheadral is named after
someone, these are possessive nouns.

Sir Edmund Halley hardly possessed the comet that is named after him,
called Halley's Comet!

The fact that Ambassadors are appointed to the Court of St. James is
immaterial. That just happens to be the way it's written. Equally
gramatically correct (although not used, simply by tradition, not
because it's gramatically incorrect) would be "Ambassador to St. James'
Court".


The irony is that St. James was supposedly buried in Compostela, Spain,
and is one of the patron saints of Spain. In Spanish, he has
a special name, "Santiago". You'd think after defeating the
Spanish Armada, the royal house might have thought about renaming
the palace, huh?

Interesting!


--
Ned Carlson
SW side of Chicago, USA
www.tubezone.net

Marc.

St Johns Wood or St John's Wood?
 

St Johns Wood or St John's Wood?
 

On 27 Jun 2006 11:25:43 -0700, "Solario"
wrote:


Mark B wrote:

Which is right,
St James' Park (on the signs)
St James Park (in the FGW Timetable)
Pronounced St James's Park, both locally and on the AutoAnouncer

Opinion

The first example could be wrong in context. If it is a street name
sign it should read "St James Park". If it is a park name board then
I guess St James' Park could be correct.

Only if it was named after two or more people called "Jame".

snip
--
_______
+---------------------------------------------------+ |\\ //|
| Charles Ellson: | | \\ // |
+---------------------------------------------------+ | |
| // \\ |
Alba gu brath |//___\\|

St Johns Wood or St John's Wood?
 

In article Mark B writes:
Which is right,
St James' Park (on the signs)
St James Park (in the FGW Timetable)
Pronounced St James's Park, both locally and on the AutoAnouncer

I think you never will know which is right. If I remember right, there
are Earl's Court and Barron's Court, both with and without apostrophe.
LT uses the apostrophe in one of them, the street signs use it on the other.
--
dik t. winter, cwi, kruislaan 413, 1098 sj amsterdam, nederland, +31205924131
home: bovenover 215, 1025 jn amsterdam, nederland; http://www.cwi.nl/~dik/

St Johns Wood or St John's Wood?
 

In message , Dik T. Winter writes

In article Mark B
writes:
Which is right,
St James' Park (on the signs)
St James Park (in the FGW Timetable)
Pronounced St James's Park, both locally and on the AutoAnouncer

I think you never will know which is right. If I remember right, there
are Earl's Court and Barron's Court, both with and without apostrophe.
LT uses the apostrophe in one of them, the street signs use it on the other.

Exactly. When it comes to place names, their form is dictated by
historical precedent and custom rather than rules of grammar.

For instance, in Elizabethan times, travellers from the north would most
likely enter the city through "Bysshopes Gate". Despite the fact that
the standard genitive ending ("-es") indicates a possessive noun, it was
never modernised to "Bishop's Gate" or even "Bishops' Gate" - instead
(and as early as the 17th century) it became simply Bishopsgate.

--
Paul Terry

St Johns Wood or St John's Wood?
 

In message , Roland Perry
writes

In message , at
08:21:09 on Tue, 27 Jun 2006, Ned Carlson
remarked:

However, the official royal website calls the palace, St. James's
Palace.

And all the old maps I have ever found (going back centuries) also use
that spelling (for the palace and nearby roads, churches etc).

If you go back far enough, you will arrive at the pre-apostropheic age:
for instance, John Norden's plan of c.1600 gives "Saint James Parke".

But I certainly agree that "James's" appears on most maps after that
date, once the apostrophe had become an accepted device.
--
Paul Terry

St Johns Wood or St John's Wood?
 

In message .com,
writes

So the question is: Do cartographers follow street signposting
conventions, or, do they "correct" the spelling of street names
back into their normal English form?

Don't rely on cartographers (not at least before the late 19th century)
for definitive spellings. It is common to find quite different spellings
of the same word, such as "fyelde and feild" [sic], or "saint and
seynte" on the same map - remember that English spelling was not
standardised in bygone times.

Moreover, has cartographic practice, in this respect, changed over
time?

In cartography there has been a long tradition of copying and updating
earlier maps (with some notable exceptions) because of the cost of
surveying and plate-making. It would probably be fair to say that the
two big London re-mapping projects in the 1860s (Stanford's Library Map
and Weller's Dispatch Atlas) tended to set new standards of accuracy.
These days, I suspect that mapmakers generally follow the lead given by
the Ordnance Survey, especially with regard to spellings of road and
place names.
--
Paul Terry

St Johns Wood or St John's Wood?
 

wrote:


So the question is: Do cartographers follow street signposting
conventions, or, do they "correct" the spelling of street names
back into their normal English form?

Moreover, has cartographic practice, in this respect, changed over
time?

Adrian.

What I'm wondering, is HTF did apostrophes get into the
English language, anyway? None of its ancestor/contributing
languages (Anglo-Saxon, Norse, French, Celtic) use or
used apostrophes, did they?

Didn't the British government go on a campaign a few years
ago to eliminate unnecessary punctuation in bureaucratic
communications, aside from commas and full stops (what us
Americans call a period)?


--
Ned Carlson
SW side of Chicago, USA
www.tubezone.net

St Johns Wood or St John's Wood?
 

Mark B wrote:

Which is right,
St James' Park (on the signs)
St James Park (in the FGW Timetable)
Pronounced St James's Park, both locally and on the AutoAnouncer

St James's Park, because that's the name of the park.

Mike

St Johns Wood or St John's Wood?
 

In article . com,
mmellor writes

Mark B wrote:

Which is right,
St James' Park (on the signs)
St James Park (in the FGW Timetable)
Pronounced St James's Park, both locally and on the AutoAnouncer

St James's Park, because that's the name of the park.

Mike


Seen on a car number plate yesterday

St John's Wood bmw or something like that .co.uk or .com ;)
--
Tony Sayer