As English lost the old forms, it gained new ones, in the form of what we traditionally call contractions. They arose starting in the early 1500s, having begun in less crunched forms such as donnot for don’t and wonnot for won’t , of which cannot has for some reason held on despite can’t existing alongside. We no longer have nis from ne + is , but we have isn’t , and while nave is no more, we have haven’t . The apostrophes do not make isn’t and haven’t different from nis and nave . The apostrophe is not pronounced; nor does it mark a pause: it is simply a convention of how we transcribe speech into marks on a page, and quite an arbitrary one: comprehension would suffer not a bit if we wrote isnt and hasnt .
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