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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

#241

Post by School-Cotton »

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!!!

Language is a social and cultural phenomenon. That doesn’t mean there are no rules. It means that the rules are implicitly decided collectively by the community of speakers rather than by a centralized body.

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

#242

Post by Muromec »

OkayPhysicist wrote: post #227
Tainnor wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A writing system being phonetic would be impractical, because most languages have tons of little phonetic alterations of individual sounds depending on position in the word/syllable, regional variation, etc. 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 e…

English should just abandon differentiating vowels all together. All dialects of English shwa unemphasized vowels to some extent, and the different dialects largely boil down to how we pronounce various vowels. J`st ch`nge `m t` di`cr`t'c m`rks, `nd `t's st`ll p`rf`ctl` l`g`ble

reject the alphabet and stop writing vowels unless really needed.

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

#243

Post by makeitdouble »

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…

> lingua-franca of the day that is English. Of course neither German nor French would be a better alternative as a global international neutral language.

Being a linga-frinca has nothing to do with merits though.

Aside from "linga franca" being literally "French", it's a matter of which group of nations have a tremendously dominant position on the international scene. If China was to take hold of India and Russia and set the rules for the rest of the world, the defacto linga-frinca won't be English for long, however intricate people might feel about Chinese.

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

#244

Post by duped »

Eddy_Viscosity2 wrote: post #236
wolframhempel wrote: post #220

I feel that most people instinctively assume that some institution, e.g. the government or the dictionary publishers are the authority on what constitutes "correct language". It's important to emphasize that language (included spelling) is something that develops organically and that the role of these institutions is just to capture the status quo. At least that should be the case in free societies. Language is power…

Indeed, dictionaries and governments are just writing down what's already happening in the language. In a way language is one of the only truly democratic institutions. We all vote for new words and new pronunciations by using them or not using them. The collective action of all these choices is the language.

That's not always accurate, many of these government bodies fight the evolution of the vernacular and suppress dialects or loanwords.

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

#245

Post by moffkalast »

wolframhempel wrote: post #220

I feel that most people instinctively assume that some institution, e.g. the government or the dictionary publishers are the authority on what constitutes "correct language". It's important to emphasize that language (included spelling) is something that develops organically and that the role of these institutions is just to capture the status quo. At least that should be the case in free societies. Language is power…

Language is power,

France is bacon.

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

#246

Post by mppm »

For those interested, I highly recommend "The Unfolding of Language" by Guy Deutscher, in which he describes how languages evolve over time, to the great annoyance of purists, but without either losing or gaining sophistication in the long run. It's a very entertaining read and has considerably reduced my irritation at "incorrect" use of language.

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

#247

Post by sigmoid10 »

cdrini wrote: post #189
sigmoid10 wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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"…

But who's to say which new words are "acceptable" and which aren't? Of course if you ask old people they will give these Shakespearean answers, but they are not the ones defining the future of a language. It's the young generation. And they have a very different approach to creating new words. Why should their new words be worth less? And the example in the original post is actually the worst kind according to your definition, because it makes the language less consistent.

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

#248

Post by Muromec »

OptionOfT wrote: post #91
helpfulContrib wrote: post #4

German is not that easy, either, though. Das/Der/Die is a constant source of frustration. Its never easy to remember.

Same in French. Le and la. (Masculine or feminine). In Dutch: De and het, where de is for masculine and feminine, and het for ... I don't even know. And I'm a native Dutch speaker. Edit: German also has cases: Nominative, accusative, dative and genitive, like Greek. Latin had a 5th one.

How about up to seven cases and three genders in Slavic languages? That's the real struggle.

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

#249

Post by michaelt »

graypegg wrote: post #186
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... )

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…

> So it's definitely not impossible.

Well, it's definitely not impossible to publish a document declaring itself the standard form of english.

But I'm pretty sure it would be impossible to get english speakers to comply - or even to get any countries to make the standard legally binding.

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

#250

Post by School-Cotton »

t0mas88 wrote: post #24
ivan_gammel wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those plural forms are sometimes referred to as European continental dialect of English and do not raise questions here. If we, Europeans have to use English as lingua franca, we can and we will adapt it to our needs same way as Americans, Afro-Americans or Indians did. So my advice: just get used to it. Edit: cultural possession of language is nonsense, it belongs to all speakers, native and non-native alike. German…

The Dutch may have some "rights" to adapt English. They're #1 in non-native English proficiency for 5 years in a row and surpassed Canada (considered native speakers) on overall English proficiency some years ago. One point of debate is that English in the Netherlands has become mostly American English over the last decades due to media influence. While originally "school English" in the Netherlands was British Engli…

> Canada (considered native speakers)

A quarter of the population of Canada is in Quebec where the only official language is French and most people would not be considered native English speakers.

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