Just for the record, I think the possessive of James is James's. Not James' and certainly not Jame's.
Yet, for some reason, the majority of people seem to write James' or Jame's.
The latter two would only make sense if my name were something like Jame (and, in the case of James', there were two or more of me).
Phonetically, when you say the possessive of James, [dʒæɪmzəz], there are two [z] sounds, so there's no reason why you can't write 's' twice. Each <s> corresponds to a [z].
One interesting exception, though, seems to be with a word like Jesus [dʒiːzəz] which already has [zəz] at the end. If you listen to someone casually saying "Jesus's disciples", they will often say five syllables [dʒiːzəz dɪsaɪpl̩z] and not six [dʒiːzəzəz dɪsaɪpl̩z]. But even in that case I would argue "Jesus's" is the correct spelling of the possessive.
(NOTE: My IPA is very rusty so don't trust my transcriptions)
The original post was in the category: linguistic_observations but I'm still in the process of migrating categories over.
The original post had 5 comments I'm in the process of migrating over.