Well, no, it seems. Lots of people appear to have problems. Look at this sign from the window of a restaurant in Gadong:
Despite the obvious care taken in writing the words so beautifully, there is an apostrophe before the plural 's' suffix on menu ‒ this is just a simple plural, not a possessive or a contraction, so the rule says that no apostrophe should be used.And look another sign at the same restaurant:
Here we find an apostrophe not just with the plural noun (hours) but also with the verb (starts). The writer of these signs seems to believe that an apostrophe should be used whenever an 's' suffix occurs, regardless of what the suffix represents.Actually, this problem is found not just with second language users of English, such as in Brunei, but in England as well. Recently, there has been an outcry because the city council in Birmingham decided to get rid of all apostrophes in its road signs (see the BBC World article), and both Language Log and World Wide Words have commented on the issue.
If apostrophes cause so many problems, maybe we should do away with them. Note that my uncles and my uncle's are pronounced the same, regardless of whether the 's' is a plural or possessive suffix, so we seem to do just fine in making sense of this distinction in speech, even when no differences are made in the pronunciation. However, one problem is that without an apostrophe, we'll would become the same as well, and she'd would become shed, so in some situations the apostrophe makes important distinctions which are represented in our pronunciation.
Anyway, it doesn't make much difference what rules we linguists and teachers try to make. One way or another, the apostrophe will disappear if common usage determines that it is not useful, no matter how much effort teachers expend in trying to preserve it.
