yes

the apostrophe is used to indicate an elision (dropped letters).

Originally the saxon genitive (possessive form) was written "es" and was then abbreviated to "'s"but the problem is that we use the same punctuation for the elision of the letter "i" in "is", so to avoid the confusion the apostrophe itself has been supressed.

At least that's my guess. It's difficult to say why words evolve the way they do - why do we say beautiful with only one 'l', for example?

Posted By: Dave in France, Jan 7, 21:27:42