Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Germans decry influence of English as 'idiot's apostrophe' gets approval

theguardian.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–170 of 576 posts

Re: Germans decry influence of English as 'idiot's apostrophe' gets approval

#161

Post by allemagne »

This makes me really curious how quickly German has actually evolved over time.

My assumptions would be entirely informed from extrapolating from historical context and not knowing anything about German.

So there was probably a lot of linguistic diversity before unification in 1870, then there would have been a standardization effort started by Bismarck (favoring the dialect predominantly spoken in Prussia) which would carry through WW1, would be relaxed during the Weimar republic, would intensify (or turn into something bizarre and Orwellian) in the Nazi era, and then a slight divergence between East and West Germany in the Cold War.

Under this, my rough hypothesis would be that German has actually changed a lot less in the post-WW2 era, especially since the 90s, than it would have in the period before.

Is this roughly how things shook out? I'd be really interested where this is completely wrong.

Re: Germans decry influence of English as 'idiot's apostrophe' gets approval

#163

Post by nobody9999 »

vundercind wrote: post #33
mattferderer wrote: post #20

Made me think of this old joke that's been on HackerNews, Reddit, etc for years: The European Commission has just announced an agreement whereby English will be the official language of the European Union rather than German, which was the other possibility. As part of the negotiations, the British Government conceded that English spelling had some room for improvement and has accepted a 5- year phase-in plan that wou…

Reads like Mark Twain’s short piece “A Plan for the Improvement of English Spelling” https://faculty.georgetown.edu/jod/texts/twain.html [edit] Maybe Twain, anyway. The attribution is dubious, but common.

>Reads like Mark Twain’s short piece “A Plan for the Improvement of English Spelling”

Which is a gem, regardless of authorship. Another related bit associated with Twain is:

“whenever the literary german dives into a sentence, this is the last you are going to see of him till he emerges on the other side of his atlantic with his verb in his mouth.”[0]

Which, as a native English speaker who learned German, I find both amusing and (mostly) correct.

[0] https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/115614-whenever-the-literar...

Edit: Added source reference link.

Re: Germans decry influence of English as 'idiot's apostrophe' gets approval

#164

Post by everforward »

asimpletune wrote: post #148

English had been so heavily influenced by European languages that it’s just a funny coincidence that we’re alive to see the opposite happening. It feels like half (or more) of Italian words have English cognates or they’re so close you could consider them a slant cognate. Another thing is that what happened in the article is something that has occurred a lot in English too. I think a few years back they permitted “my…

I believe using "of" is correct when using "myriad" as a noun, the same as "many" or "number" (the noun form of numerous). "He had a great number of seashells", "she possessed a myriad of skills".

Apparently it used to/still means 10,000 so it should be usable anywhere 10,000 is. "There were a myriad of them"/"there were 10,000 of them".

Re: Germans decry influence of English as 'idiot's apostrophe' gets approval

#165

Post by falcor84 »

jjk166 wrote: post #105

Reminds me of the story: > A Pan Am 727 flight, waiting for start clearance in Munich, overheard the following: > Lufthansa (in German): "Ground, what is our start clearance time?" > Ground (in English): "If you want an answer you must speak in English." > Lufthansa (in English): "I am a German, flying a German airplane, in Germany. Why must I speak English?" > Unknown voice from another plane (in a beautiful British…

I might regret saying it, but I think we as humanity should go back to wars being definitively won, rather than dragging on indefinitely. It's obviously a poor metaphor, but I'm thinking of something like the "Fifty-move rule" in chess - e.g. if no significant area changed sides in e.g. 100 days, then we officially redraw the maps (by treaty if possible), cease hostilities and let people rebuild and get on with their lives.

Re: Germans decry influence of English as 'idiot's apostrophe' gets approval

#166

Post by [deleted] »

asimpletune wrote: post #148

English had been so heavily influenced by European languages that it’s just a funny coincidence that we’re alive to see the opposite happening. It feels like half (or more) of Italian words have English cognates or they’re so close you could consider them a slant cognate. Another thing is that what happened in the article is something that has occurred a lot in English too. I think a few years back they permitted “my…

[deleted]

Re: Germans decry influence of English as 'idiot's apostrophe' gets approval

#168

Post by rob74 »

> The new edition of the Council for German Orthography’s style guide [...] lists “Eva’s Blumenladen” (Eva’s Flower Shop) and “Peter’s Taverne” (Peter’s Tavern) as usable alternatives, though “Eva’s Brille” (“Eva’s glasses”) remains incorrect.

So they didn't actually simplify it - they made it more complicated? But my single largest pet peeve with the original reform is that they "outlawed" the use of the English plural form for loan words like "Party". In German, you are now supposed to write "Partys", "Parties" is incorrect. Bet they didn't change that... or did they?

Re: Germans decry influence of English as 'idiot's apostrophe' gets approval

#169

Post by guitarbill »

pjmlp wrote: post #157
subpixel wrote: post #81

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.

As someone living here for the last 20 years, and also nowadays understands a bit of dialects and related slag, it is kind of curious the amount of Denglish words among the youth. For example, "Hast Du das geprüft?" quickly turns into "Hast du das gecheckt?".

Huh, "Hast du das gechecked?" used to mean "Hast du das kapiert?", with a quite negative connotation.

Re: Germans decry influence of English as 'idiot's apostrophe' gets approval

#170

Post by orwin »

cafard wrote: post #122

Given the long and deplorable influence of German on American scholarly prose, this inspires only Schadenfreude. I'm not singling out the Germans, mind you. I smirk also when the French complain of American modes of thought polluting their schools: when municipal bureaucrats let contracts not for demolition but for deconstruction, I say that we have injuries to avenge.

'deconstruction' in the French theory was only use by Derrida as a mean to critique a literary work.

What it means is that you only judge the works by itself. You should not judge it by the standards of the time you read it, nor by the standard of the time it was written, nor by its author life. You judge it by its internal contradictions, its hypocrisy. Your external knowledge should have no impact on how you judge the quality of literary works. How to do that? You find contradictions, and that's what deconstruction is, a mean to find internal contradictions.

How deconstruction is pollution in your mind? Please, tell me.

I'll tell you what happened. People don't read, they parrot idiotic beliefs they heard/read from other idiots who didn't grasp it in the first place, in order to singe knowledge or competency they don't have. It's American scholars who used deconstruction to mean something other than Derrida's definition, and north American idiots who conflated the two, then podcasted their beliefs without reading the man once, and expended their idiocy to other, gullible people who can't read themselves (not their fault, when you work a straining job I understand reading Derrida isn't your priority).

Post reply on HN