151–160 of 576 posts
Speaking of the English language influencing German, I want my Erdbeermarmelade back. I don't care that english marmalde cannot be made of strawberries.
Why would you not be able to make it out of Strawberries? You can make Marmalade with any fruit. :)
> The Deppenapostroph is not to be confused with the English greengrocer’s apostrophe, when an apostrophe before an ‘s’ is mistakenly used to form the plural of a noun (“a kilo of potato’s”). Grocer's apostrophes annoy me, along with words like "advices" (advice is an abstract noun and can't be plural, like "happiness") and "learnings" (use "lessons" instead).
I’ve never heard “advices” (in the US). Maybe it is a continental Europe thing? They may have surpassed even us, at the art of inventing new words and spellings to annoy the English.
I knew of a building named Water's Edge, but spelled "Waters Edge". The absence of a possessive apostrophe was bothersome but I realised there's a case for sacrificing correctness for things like ease of communication and how the words look. An insight from Oscar Wilde: > Mr. Noel, in one of his essays, speaks with much severity of those who prefer sound to sense in poetry. No doubt, this is a very wicked thing to do…
But Waters Edge is totally fine if they mean "by the edge of the waters" and not "the edge belongs to the water". But hey, there are no rules or logic in English so have at it!
I thought about trees:
Tree leaves (leaves from a tree)
Trees leaves (same but from more than one variety of tree)
Same logic for water:
Water edge (an edge that happens to be of a body of water)
Waters edge (same but of more than one body of water)
I lived in Germany on two occasions and regularly consume German media. English words are all over the German vernacular, to the point that it's really, really annoying.
Ironically, even British English has the issue of Americanisms sneaking in, see e.g. the IT Crowd episode: "How hard is it to remember 911?" "You mean 999? That's the American one".
Having French as mother tongue, I always find fascinating when the French and German official bodies go postal about such a topic. It’s like looking some parents complaining of the retro-influence of some common bastard children. :P Now, there are languages for which Globish can be part of an existential threat, but German and French are nowhere close to this. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_endangered_lan…
English being an amalgamated language and thus uniquely flexible is part of its power. We have options in style choices many languages formally don’t permit, e.g. when to italicise or, if quoting, whether to “exclude punctuation”, or “include it.” (As well as comma use.) As a fellow French speaker, I think these are strengths other languages could gain from. Couriel or email (or e-mail)? Speaker’s choice. Same for po…
Anyway, yeah, I love this sort of mixing of languages and I’m glad a lot of cultures are more open about mixing in English.
I lived in Germany on two occasions and regularly consume German media. English words are all over the German vernacular, to the point that it's really, really annoying.
For example, "Hast Du das geprüft?" quickly turns into "Hast du das gecheckt?".
I say the EU should adopt the Romanian language. It's spoken the same way as it is written. That should solve all spelling problems forever. :)))
No natural language is actually 100% phonetic. Romanian is no exception. Romanian spelling and pronunciation are close to phonetic, but the same is true of German.
What you usually want is that the writing system be phonemic, i.e. that there is a 1:1 correspondence between phonemes (meaningfully distinctive sound units) and characters. Unfortunately, languages evolve, so even if your writing systems starts out as more or less phonemic, over time the sounds of the language will drift and inertia will usually keep the writing system not fully in sync with these changes. This is particularly bad in the case of English, where there's never been a proper spelling reform accounting for the corresponding sound changes.
Having French as mother tongue, I always find fascinating when the French and German official bodies go postal about such a topic. It’s like looking some parents complaining of the retro-influence of some common bastard children. :P Now, there are languages for which Globish can be part of an existential threat, but German and French are nowhere close to this. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_endangered_lan…
I wouldn't mind for English to have "standardisation body" akin to French or German one (or RAE for Spanish) that could maybe get rid of backward, dumb spelling ;) (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English-language_spelling_refo... )
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why would you not be able to make it out of Strawberries? You can make Marmalade with any fruit. :)
Generally marmalade is made out of citrus fruits.