Introduction to contractions | The Apostrophe | Punctuation | Khan Academy Video Lecture | Complete Course on English Grammar: Upgrade your Speaking & Listening - Personal Skills

hello grammarians hello David hello
Paige so today we're going to talk about
contractions which are another use for
our friend the apostrophe so David what
is a contraction so something that
apostrophes are really good at doing is
showing when letters are missing from a
word right so let's say we have
something like the two-word phrase I
will so
in linguistics I'm told there's this
idea called the principle of least
effort but I'm not linguist Paige you
are what is the principle of least
effort so that's kind of a fancy way of
saying people like to be lazy sure which
is you know tends to be accurate across
language so you know we can say
something like I will but honestly that
kind of takes a lot of effort to say
right I have to articulate the mouth in
this particular way and it's just easier
to just collapse all of that into one
you know one syllable one sound to say
Iowa and when we do that we use an
apostrophe to indicate the missing
letters that missing wit sound that's a
contraction so most modal verbs right if
you remember modal auxiliaries from the
verbs section we use those a lot in
English and so it's really easy to
combine those with most words or
pronouns into a contraction so you could
take the phrase she would which is a lot
of letters to say takes a lot of letters
to write and we can turn that into with
the help of our friend the apostrophe
the word she'd means the same thing yeah
that's pretty amazing I mean this tiny
apostrophe stands in the place of all of
these letters yeah it's doing a lot of
work have I got a deal for you Paige how
would you like three letters for the
price of four with because you can
shorten you know something like he is -
he's right yeah I mean that's what the
principle you were talking about is all
about
he is isn't that hard to say but he's is
a lot easier so this is pretty
straightforward but there are some kind
of strange uses of contractions some
strange uses of the apostrophe that
don't seem as immediately evident on
their face so for example if you
contract the phrase will not into a
single contraction it doesn't it doesn't
turn into wilt it turns into won't so in
this case the apostrophe stands in the
place of this oh but all these letters
disappear and they're kind of
unaccounted for it's weird it's like the
Bermuda Triangle of punctuation marks
they all just kind of got sucked up into
that that apostrophe never to be seen
again
who knows where they went but there
aren't a ton of those there's won't
there's don't but okay but not to take
away from our original point this is
what the apostrophe does when it's
working to contract right it just takes
letters from the middle of a word and it
takes them away it stands in for the
fact that there are letters missing you
got it cool so I will goes to aisle she
would be comes she'd he is becomes he's
and will not be comes won't
so that's contractions you can learn
anything Dave it out page out