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

251–260 of 576 posts

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

#251

Post by Muromec »

inglor_cz wrote: post #85
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.

It is doubly so if your native language is also a gendered one, but with different genders for common objects. It makes a mess in your head. CZ: ten nůž (masc.) - DE: das Messer (neutr.) - EN: knife CZ: ten svět (masc.) - DE: die Welt (fem.) - EN: world CZ: ta žába (fem.) - DE: der Frosch (masc.) - EN: frog Also, personified Death and rivers seem to be masculine-coded in Germanic languages, and feminine-coded in Slav…

To nobody's surprise ніж, світ, жаба have exactly right genders so it's Germans who are confused.

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

#252

Post by sweezyjeezy »

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…

France has a mechanism to try to stop this: the Académie Française [1] that publishes the official French dictionary. Rather than simply recording language as its used, they do actively try to steer it. They're most well known for trying to suppress anglicisms, e.g. in the early 2000s they pushed 'courriel' instead of 'email'. That one did not work out - email is much more common, and finally entered the dictionary in 2009 (to this day labelled 'anglicism' and discouraged over 'mél').

FWIW the German equivalent is much less prescriptive, it only weighs in on grammar / punctuation.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acad%C3%A9mie_Fran%C3%A7aise

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

#253

Post by jamincan »

inkcapmushroom wrote: post #142
jjk166 wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That one's a bit mean given that data does have a distinct plural, it just happens to be spelled the same because whoever came up with english didn't really grok the phonetic alphabet.

Datum is the singular, which is one point of data. When you group together a datum with another datum, they become data.

And the origin of that plural form comes from Latin.

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

#254

Post by sigmoid10 »

School-Cotton wrote: post #241
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!!!

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.

If you spend enough time among the right communities, you'll find tons of people speaking that way or any other way. Especially among the uneducated demographics. The very same ones that created this new rule in the original article (hence the name "idiot's" apostrophe). Now should we listen to them or not? I see highly conflicting statements here.

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

#255

Post by samatman »

tivert wrote: post #197
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... )

> 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 ;) That's even less likely now than in the past, with the elite cultural trends in English-speaking countries favoring the adoption of foreign spellings and pronunciation. That just piles on the complexity to unmanageable levels. IMHO, for instance, there's…

There are basically political reasons for this. Wade-Giles is associated with Taiwan, and is in fact mostly used when referring to Taiwanese subjects, I've always seen Kaohsiung for the city, never Gāoxióng.

The Mainlanders would find it very insulting to not use Pinyin when referring to subjects in the PRC, so understandably, American journalism goes along with that.

For what it's worth I think both systems have different disadvantages, in that neither does a good job of reflecting the actual pronunciation of Guoyu. Excuse me, Putonghua. Doing so with the English character set isn't actually possible.

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

#256

Post by Muromec »

lxgr wrote: post #43
vundercind wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Corporate English is a blight. So many ugly substitutions, overloading existing words, for perfectly good and common words we already have.

Let's double-click on that: There's value in expensive signalling, and sometimes the expense is an intentional (or at least tolerated) lack of aesthetics.

Corporate life is just really boring and this kind of nonsense is understood as fun by people engaging in it.

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

#257

Post by School-Cotton »

RegnisGnaw wrote: post #59

What they need is learn from Canada and have a language police. Go around and fine business that don't follow the rules of German properly.

Nothing like what you described exists in Canada.

You are presumably referring to the OQLF (a provincial institution, not a “Canadian” one) which enforces French as the dominant public language in Quebec. Given that Quebec, despite being surrounded by the Anglosphere, hasn’t ended up like Louisiana or Ireland where French or Irish as the primary native language is a distant memory, suggests that their efforts are successful.

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

#258

Post by indigoabstract »

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…

Nice one. This confirms my long held suspicion that German contains a lot of badly spelled Englisch words. Or maybe, it's the other way around?

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

#259

Post by duped »

wil421 wrote: post #240
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Is English just badly pronounced French?[1] I wish English would’ve adopted conjugation and other patterns the Romance languages use. I doubt it would’ve fit correctly. But it would be better than having 1,000s of badly pronounced French words in the language. [1] https://www.barrons.com/amp/news/english-just-badly-pronounc...

> Is English just badly pronounced French?

Oh totally, my American accent sounds just like, "quand je vais au barbecue le quatre juillet, je vais manger un hot dog avec ketchup."

> But it would be better than having 1,000s of badly pronounced French words in the language.

They're loanwords that changed over time, they're not "badly" pronounced at all. French is filled with many loanwords as well that are pronounced nothing like their language of origin

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

#260

Post by itronitron »

ToucanLoucan wrote: post #118
pivo wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I saw it in a Home Depot in the US once. It was father's day and there was a sign that read, "Dad's Love Tools". Of course they meant to say, "Dads Love Tools". I thought it was particularly funny and embarrassing for the store, but I couldn't get the clerk at the store to understand what was wrong.

> I couldn't get the clerk at the store to understand what was wrong. Not surprising. Tons of Americans are borderline illiterate. It's one of many things that makes it annoying to live here, especially as the amount of communication done in text increases with more advents in technology. I recall reading somewhere that the standard reading level for the states is about sixth grade, and if anything that comes across…

Even among the highly educated, it's shocking how resistant some of them are to written communication.

I used to wonder if there was something wrong with my email, then I considered maybe they were likely busy, indifferent, or lazy, and now I wonder if they are just barely functionally literate so that drafting a response induces a significant mental burden.

Post reply on HN