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  1. Please confirm reception of my emails dated Jan. 15.

With Saxon genitive:

  1. Please confirm my emails dated Jan. 15's reception.

  2. Please confirm my emails dated Jan. 15' reception.

Which of 2 or 3 (or neither) is correct? I ask not about 1, even if it's more common.

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  • 'Please confirm my emails of the 15th Jan' is how I would word it.
    – Nigel J
    Commented Jan 16, 2018 at 6:37
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    I don't understand how "Saxon genitive" has a place here or how "Please confirm my emails of the 15th Jan" makes the choice the OP wanted or how either of the OP's examples could ever be acceptable.
    – Robbie Goodwin
    Commented Jan 25, 2018 at 20:41
  • Neither option 2 nor option 3 make much sense to me. In any case, 'receipt' would be the more common word to use, not 'reception', which implies receiving a person, not an object. Thus, I would say 'Please confirm receipt of my e-mails of the 15th of January'.
    – JDF
    Commented Mar 20, 2018 at 14:52

2 Answers 2

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3 ("my emails dated Jan. 15' reception") is certainly incorrect. A final apostrophe can only ever be used to mark the "Saxon genitive" when it comes directly after an /s/ or /z/ sound.* In other contexts, the "Saxon genitive" marker has to be written as <'s>, even when the head noun is plural: note that we write children's, not children'.

So if you must use either 2 or 3, 2 would be preferable (but not good, for reasons mentioned in the comments: it sounds very unnatural to me).

*There are also other, more complicated criteria that further restrict the use of the final apostrophe: for example, even though the irregular plural noun geese ends in /s/, the plural possessive has to be written as geese's (pronounced /giːsɨz/). In some contexts, the usage of <'> vs. <'s> is not uniform, even for educated speakers.

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1 is correct and the one I prefer.

2 is grammatically correct but feels clumsy. I had to read it twice.

3 is not grammatically correct.

The Saxon genitive only applies with a /s/ or /z/ sound at the end. 15 has neither (it's a /n/).

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