(tl;dr: eng101)
i am officially coming out as wholly unperturbed by people using the universal "ur" in informal communications. the fact that whoever taught you english grammar decided to get all fancy in how they were going to try and get you to remember the difference between "your" and "you're" and it resulted in you being too confused to even care shouldn't stand in the way of you being able to carry on a decent conversation. from now on, i'm not going to be taking points off anybody's papers for using 'ur' when they mean either "your" or "you're".
but just for the record:
"your" is a possessive personal pronoun. it means that something belongs to or is the responsibility of a person immediately present in the sentence (namely, you). it doesn't have an apostrophe for the same reason words like "my" and "his" don't have apostrophes. it's the same kind of word.
the reason third person possessives have apostrophes (i.e. "Bill's car.") is because they are not pronouns (there are only six pronouns in english - the possessive forms are: my, your, his, hers, our, and their). people's names, like Bill, or words that name things, like car, are regular nouns, not pronouns. to make them possessives ("Bill's car", "the car's gas tank"), we use the apostrophe. you have to use the apostrophe to make regular nouns possessive because without one, it just means the noun is plural ("Bill's two cars"). english is fancy-shmancy that way.
on the other hand, "you're" is a contraction. contractions have more to do with etymology (the study of how words develop) than english grammar, because they're not just one word. they're bits of phrases which are so commonly grouped together when spoken that the sounds they make have come to be words in their own right ("hallow's evening" becomes "halloween"). "you're" is the preposition "you are". it puts the subject ("you") ahead of a descriptive statement about it ("you're a human being"). you might already realize that we do the same thing in english with "will" and "have" (meaning future and past; i.e. "You've learned a lot", "You'll do great things"). we express these ideas together so consistently that at some point in the development of the language, it simply became easier to hold them as ideas of their own and make them into their own words.
when it comes to the contractions, we still have the same six pronouns, but for prepositions, we use their regular form and not the possessive form. (regular pronouns: i, you, he, she, we, they) remember, they're already whole words inside their respective contractions, so they don't change form.
i saved "its" and "it's" for last because people get stuck on it a lot. all the other pronouns change between their regular and possessive forms ("i" becomes "my", "we" becomes "our"). "it" appears the same in both forms, and it follows both of the rules at the same time. when expressing "it" as owning something or describing one of its qualities, no apostrophe ("Its full rotation takes 24 hours"). when you're naming what "it" is doing or what "it" is like, that's the preposition form, and it needs the apostrophe to click it together ("It's a blue planet"). it's hard to sort out sometimes because the noun "it" must necessarily apply to a literally infinite number of objects, so it basically has to follow all the rules simultaneously. i got a whole lot of B's on perfectly good papers because i don't really care anymore when the apostrophe goes in this word either most of the time, tbh.
(scrolls back) holy crap. so, i hope you enjoyed "english lessons you didn't ask for" with Auntie Zeropoint. if i ever learn anything else, i'll let you know, i'm sure.
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