Posted: Thu Mar 12, 2009 3:20 pm
this is all wrong
Okay, just to weigh in as a languages student on the Tails'/Tail's/Tails/Tails's thing:
There are two conflicting bases here, the first one having to do with possessive formation in Germanic nouns and the other having to do with how Latin handles loan-words. As people who have too much time on their hands will tell you, every stupid piece of grammar that people complain about because it "doesn't make sense" is an example of someone trying to make English more like Latin, so let's start with that one.
Latin is, of course, an inflected language with lots and lots of cases (English has two: Objective and Subjective and it only really matters with pronouns: he/him, I/me, we/us etc.; Latin has ~6). So with a nice, Latin name like Julius, it's very easy to make a possessive, as you'd merely have to use the genitive case: Julii. That's oversimplifying, but you get the point.
Later on, when you're getting Vulgate Bible forms of Hebrew names, they're Latin transliterations (words changed from one alphabet to another) of Greek transliterations of the original Hebrew, and it got very confused. Some of them look enough like Latin words that they continue to decline ("Rebecca" (sometimes) goes to "Rebeccae, Rebeccam" etc) but others simply don't decline at all and they can function as whatever case the sentence needs. So what started out as a "just do what sounds good" rule gave us the fascist grammarian "Biblical names don't decline except when they do" rule, then later on that gets changed into "foreign names that look weird," and by the time we get to modern English the only names capable of "looking weird" are those that already end in S.
The second force at work has to do with Germanic noun formation. If you go back far enough (even in Chaucer's day, although it's more pronounced in Anglo-Saxon) English was also heavily inflected, and there were two kinds of nouns: strong (those that experience a stem change in the plural) and weak (those that don't). Think of child/children and man/men vs. lamp/lamps. They declined differently, but masculine and neuter strong verbs had the ending -es in the genitive, of which 's is today's convoluted cousin.
As the language simplified, and we ended up with a couple of fossilized constructions (grabbing a sword "by the hilts," the word "midships," constructions like "one of John's friends") the only die-hard case was the genitive, which saw the rules shift completely so that the rule was simply "add an s." (I'm afraid this part is a bit out of my expertise, so someone else will have to explain why that happened)
Later on, and I swear I read this somewhere but I can't any longer remember where, so take it with a grain of salt, an 18th century grammarian who didn't really understand this point, decided (not completely without reason) that the s must be a contraction with a genitive article "his": rather than "Johns buddy" the construction was originally "John his buddy," and thus we ought to have an apostrophe there. I have no idea how he ended up with s' for plurals (except for the plurals of strong nouns, which are still 's: child's/children's and never, never childrens') but whatever; that seems to be the rule. My point is that the apostrophe doesn't actually have a philological reason for its existence, it's merely an aid to comprehensibility.
So Tails. Tails is a nickname that's actually the plural of the common noun "tail," because he happens to have two tails. It's also what for argument's sake we'll call a loan-name, in that it doesn't immediately conform comfortably to our expectations. So we're left with two conflicting principles again: do we want the "correct" form, or the form that functions as an aid to understanding? We're left with a few titles:
1) Tails' Adventure - If we take the "tails" as a plural common noun, they function as a synechdoche for the whole fox who happens to have two tails, and this form works grammatically. It really should have a definite article in front of it, though: "The Tails' Adventure."
2) Tails's Adventure - If we take "Tails" as a proper noun with no reference to the fact that it's kind of a plural, this form makes perfect sense, and conveys the possessive nature. "Tails's Adventure."
3) Tails Adventure - In this case, the "Tails" doesn't function as a possessive at all, but rather this is a hendiadys, a construction in which one just throws two nouns together as a phrase and one functions vaguely as an adjective, like "paper plate." Tails here is limiting the kind of adventure it is.
I'd probably go with door #2, but 3 is probably what's printed on the box.
