What proposals have been made to give the apostrophe some relief?

The apostrophe has a lot of jobs.

• It makes things possessive,
• it indicates the omissions of letters in contractions and numbers in dates,
• it is used to indicate strange accents in dialog, and
• it indicates plurals of words and letters.

To complicate matters, it looks almost or exactly the same as the single-quote in many fonts and in handwriting.

I have read of proposals to use a distinct mark of punctuation for each task. What are some of these proposals?

Solution 1:

I'm not aware of any serious proposals to change the English language that way, but for example the use case of separating (plural) suffixes from non-words, such as "the 1990's", is handled differently in other languages, for example with a colon in Swedish or (often) with nothing at all in German. So that can be one proposal. ;-)

If you don't like the similarity of apostrophe and single quotation marks, use double quotation marks, or if you want to be exceptional, French quotation marks: « ... »

The apostrophe in the possessive 's is actually a case of omission (the more or less literal meaning of "apostrophe"), because way back when the genitive suffix was -es. So that should probably stay the way it is in any case.