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I have come across an opinion of a native speaker that:

a ten-minute talk - correct

ten minutes' talk - wrong

a ten-minute walk - correct

ten minutes' walk - correct

I can't come up with the reasoning attendant to the opinion, however, if you think it's true could you explain why ten minutes' talk - wrong.

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Because ten minutes' walk does not mean the same as a ten-minute walk.

Ten minutes' walk is almost always used as a measure of distance. It would be odd to say "I'll go for ten minutes' walk". We could say I'll go for a walk for ten minutes, or I'll go for a ten-minute walk,but not that.

But that kind of meaning is not applicable to "ten minutes' talk" - maybe if you were measuring the number of words used, or the number of hearers that got bored and fell asleep, but there's no generally accepted measure and so it has no operational meaning.

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    But here are examples by famous writers “Granville, will you step with me into the library for ten minutes' talk?" - Grant Allen, "He was thoroughly posted, and yet if there was a prize offered for the man that could put up the most uninteresting ten minutes' talk, you wouldn't know whether to bet on him or on Perkins" Mark Twain
    – user1425
    Commented Sep 8, 2022 at 14:59
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    You have a point. But those are both 19th century writers. I don't think you'd find such an instance now. The NoW Corpus has 55 instances of "ten minutes walk" (I don't know how to search it with the apostrophe), and as far as I can see, all of them are measures of distance. It has one instance of "ten minutes talk", but that is actually in the phrase "five to ten minutes talk time".
    – Colin Fine
    Commented Sep 8, 2022 at 15:04
  • So, "ten minutes' walk" is used to measure distance. 1 It's ten minutes' walk to his house from here. But can "a ten-minute walk" be used with the same purpose? 2 It's a ten-minute walk to his house from here.
    – user1425
    Commented Oct 21, 2022 at 12:40
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    @user1425, yes, it can.
    – Colin Fine
    Commented Oct 21, 2022 at 12:51
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"How far away is the grocery store?" "Eh, ten minutes' walk." "A ten minute walk."

  • Both answers are correct and used often. The first answer implies more of a guesstimation of time, whereas the second implies exact knowledge of time involved.

However, the word 'talk' has evolved to be used primarily as a verb, not a noun. Its usage as a noun has largely faded from the English language. For instances where modern native English speakers would end up using 'talk' in the descriptive sense (as a noun), they will almost always substitute it for another, more descriptive word, or change the structure of the sentence so that 'talk' becomes a verb. If one does not do so, they will sound archaic at best (even if it is technically correct grammatically).

"There was a talk on politics" -> "There was a seminar on politics".

"Come inside for ten minutes' talk." -> "Let's talk for ten minutes."

Edge case: "He gave a talk on politics" - might be acceptable.

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