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

theguardian.com

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

#181

Post by mostlysimilar »

cdumler wrote: post #172

Being an old, grey beard, it's been interesting to see language change in my lifetime. Things I learned: * Third-person singular indefinite ("he or she") can be replaced with third-person plural ("they"). Of course, a lot of changes around recognizing gender. * Final punctuation within the quote at the end of sentence (Did you just say "what?") can be placed after the final quote if the quote is for a literal string…

> * Companies switched from being singular plurals ("Google is deprecating another product.") to plural singulars ("Google are deprecating another product.")

> * Moving away from verbed nouns ("Google it") to multipart verbs ("search it up").

Resist! Google is trying to get you to stop Googling things, but we don't have to listen to the corporate overlords.

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

#182

Post by jasonpeacock »

cdumler wrote: post #172

Being an old, grey beard, it's been interesting to see language change in my lifetime. Things I learned: * Third-person singular indefinite ("he or she") can be replaced with third-person plural ("they"). Of course, a lot of changes around recognizing gender. * Final punctuation within the quote at the end of sentence (Did you just say "what?") can be placed after the final quote if the quote is for a literal string…

Singular "they" has been around for a very long time, and used naturally without anyone noticing it as unusual, until recently when there's been more gender discussion and people suddenly realizing they were already recognizing genderless people without knowing it ;)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singular_they

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

#183

Post by fredgrott »

psychoslave wrote: post #64

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…

fun fact its English that is the bastard here...same way Creole was formed as language...i.e. borrowed from elsewhere in this case Danes(Anglo) and Saxon part of Germany...

and some minor contribution from the Normans of course...

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

#184

Post by eastbound »

taylorius wrote: post #130
ktosobcy wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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... )

Nah, such a body would surely be the beginning of the end. Anarchy in the UK, including its language!

France has the Académie Française. Well, no-one respects them. The first woman to enter it was Marguerite Yourcenar and she was strongly antifeminist; And they said to not use the Français.e.s spelling and rather keep the usual “Français(es)”, and suddenly all administrations started the dot-based version.

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

#185

Post by Andrex »

mattlondon wrote: post #107
nomilk wrote: post #66

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!

Hmm, it seems like water can be plural or singular purely depending on the author's preference. I didn't realize that until now.

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

#186

Post by graypegg »

ktosobcy wrote: post #112
psychoslave wrote: post #64

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... )

There are specific subsets of English that are used in certain domains that have standards bodies behind them, like Simplified Technical English for aviation. It even has a working group! [0]

VOA also have a Learning English spec for broadcast english [1] but that seems to be a lot looser of a spec.

So it's definitely not impossible. The funny thing, is I remember being told in grade school that in English Canada, I was to write numbers with a space as the thousands separator. `$10 000.00`, instead of `$10,000.00`. This is because french Canada uses a comma as a decimal point, `10 000.00 $`, so a space is non ambiguous. I have rarely ever seen the English space format in use here. I don't think English speakers would respect any authority if it wasn't as domain-scoped as Aviation or Learning english.

[0] https://www.asd-ste100.org/ [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learning_English_(version_of_E...

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

#187

Post by asimpletune »

everforward wrote: post #164
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".

O that’s funny. Apparently it was originally a noun, hundreds of years ago. It actually changed into the adjectival use I was referring to earlier in the 1800s.

If anything it seems that using myriad as an adjective was actually an example of a rule change made to accommodate how people were speaking at the time.

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

#188

Post by hilux »

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.

Similar in India. E.g. you cannot find a news report in Hindi that doesn't contain at least a smattering of English words.

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

#189

Post by cdrini »

sigmoid10 wrote: post #179
cdrini wrote: post #173

I love to see language evolve like this! Dictionaries and grammar rules are not prescriptive, they follow what/how people speak, not the other way around. They do influence in the opposite direction as well, as a bit of a normalizing/consolidating force. I feel like for the last few decades (at least) we've treated dictionaries like gospel, with very strict, almost mathematical definitions of "correct". I think givin…

tru dat! Language be evolvin like craZy n we shuld just roll wit it! Dictiunarys try to tell us wut 2 do but we aint gotta lissen! Its lyk, who needz rulez when we can make up wordz as we go, amirite? Letz just keep makin fetch happen!!!

Hahaha within reason!! I want to see eg authors just introduce new words in books, like Shakespeare. New words shouldn't generally make the language less internally consistent (goodness knows English has enough of a problem with that as it is!). I mean new words like... "He was a carrapticious old fellow. Always alert, and, despite his old age, had the mischievous sparkling eyes of a boy who has just told a bad joke".

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

#190

Post by jameshart »

abeppu wrote: post #110
maxnoe wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because, according to the new rule, it's only permitted in proper names "Eva's Blumenladen" is the proper name of the shop, what is put on the sign above the door. "Evas Brille" is just Eva's glasses.

... but even before the rule change, in virtue of being a proper name, if the proprietor calls it "Eva's Blumenladen", and it's marked as such, wasn't it proper usage to refer to it that way? If I call my English business, "Joes Cafe" (intentionally not using an apostrophe), wouldn't it be incorrect for people to refer to it in writing as "Joe's Cafe"?

Absolutely. You don’t need to come up with fake examples. Take a couple of high end British retail establishments: Harrods and Selfridges, founded by Messers Harrod and Selfridge, and neither styles itself with an apostrophe.
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