Do you just pronounce it like “Travises” like we do colloquially? Or is there some way to do it.
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!
Recursive Travii
Travodes
I like how you find this “cool”, as a non-native speaker :D
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.
Travissiz
The singular possessive is pronounced “travises.” It’s spelled Travis’s.
If you think I misspelled that, please review page 1 of Strunk & White’s The Elements of Style. The use of an s after an apostrophe does not depend on the letter preceding the apostrophe. Rather, the lack of an s after an apostrophe denotes a plural possessive.
avoid altogether. [object] belongs to Travis
Oh Trav-ee.
Yup, you pronounce a plural or possessive of a word that ends in S with the es or 's like Travises.
However, you don’t usually pronounce an 's after a plural. A single Travis that owns something would be pronounced Travises. If you are referring to a family with the surname Travis, as a group, it’s the Travises. However, if the Travises own something, it will be the Travises property, not the Traviseses property.
Whether or not you write the possessive plural as Travises’ or not seems to be a matter of debate. I do. Some rules dictate that you would write the singular possessive as Travis’ and say it Travises, others would have it written as Travis’s
