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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

#261

Post by schroeding »

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.

Eh, I wouldn't agree with that. In Germany, we had multiple top-down orthographic reforms in the past (e.g. Rechtschreibreform 1996, had many many significant, brand-new changes to make spelling and speaking more consistent) which were pretty forced, i.e. was not organic at all. I'm not saying it was bad, I like the current state of the German language - but it was not organic or democratic. Germanys equivalent to The Daily Mail even had an entire campaign against it with stickers and all.

And there is no true way to "vote with your feet" if you get punished for violating the official orthography.

Not to mention other sources of non-organic language change, like e.g. suppressing dia- or sociolects, but I also don't want to delve (hehe) too far. :P

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

#262

Post by Muromec »

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.

If language police is what I think it is, it doesn't fine for bad command of the language, but rather for using the wrong language after being asked nicely twice.

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

#263

Post by jasonpeacock »

xdennis wrote: post #228
jasonpeacock wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

> people suddenly realizing they were already recognizing genderless people without knowing it ;) Not true. It was used in the past to refer to an unknown person. I.e. "When a candidate arrives given them the test." You don't know what sex the candidate is before he arrives and instead of saying "he or she" you say "they". But nowadays people use it as a superclass of he and she: "I asked my boss for a raise but they…

Your sentence is the perfect example for proper use of "they", per the wikipedia article "It typically occurs with an indeterminate antecedent" - "boss" is non-gendered and so "they" is grammatically correct.

There's no virtue signalling, you're reading too much into it.

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

#264

Post by crazygringo »

The article doesn't mention it, but am I right in assuming this basically comes from McDonald's? There are a lot of places around the world that copy the "'s" where it doesn't exist natively, but only for restaurant names or similar -- like "Bob's" is the McDonald's clone in Brazil [1].

I'm mostly curious whether "Rosi's" and "Kati's" in the article are seen by Germans as intentionally trying to look "foreign", rather than the apostrophe "invading" German.

Like, if I go to a Sausage Haus, I'm not exactly worrying about "Haus" creeping into English to replace "House". Nor would I ever call it the "idiot's house" because that would be crazy insulting and perjorative.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob%27s

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

#265

Post by __loam »

mppm wrote: post #246

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.

On top of this I recommend languagejones on YouTube. He's a linguistics PhD that gets into things like how African American Vernacular English is actually more complex than regular English, intentionally obfuscated from white English, and has fast moving slang to stay ahead of adoption of the slang into the wider culture. It's pretty fascinating stuff and he does a lot to show how thinking some of this stuff is incorrect is actually just ignorance.

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

#267

Post by Muromec »

wrzuteczka wrote: post #229
xdennis wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Romance languages [...] evolved in the past due to the influence of "Vulgar Latin." Minor correction: they are derived, not influenced by Vulgar Latin. That's why so many words are different from Classical Latin, but similar between Romance languages. Like how Latin for house is "domus", but Romance languages use casa/casă/chez because common people referred to their house by the word "casa".

Weird twist: Slavic languages use words very similar to "domus" for "house", for example, "dom" in Polish or "дом" in Ukrainian.

That's дім, not дом, but of course it's "вдома" and "у домі" for reasons.

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

#268

Post by catlikesshrimp »

dqv wrote: post #156
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…

Just this morning I came across a guy called Mr Techpedia on YouTube and I was really surprised because I heard a lot of English phrases but also phrases that are in a different language or a dialect of English I’m not familiar with. It was actually really cool. It also reminds me of a time when I heard someone codeswitch from US Midwestern English to Malaysian English - there was a clear difference in word choice an…

I am Spanish native, but the way I structure my sentence seems a google translation from chinese. People around me often don't understand the meaning, so I have to speak slower to structure my sentence in a more proper Spanish way.

I suppose languages evolve around the way their corresponding population brains work. People can still learn other languages, or be native to other languages, but there is a language way that is the best fit to some people which is related to biology.

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

#269

Post by jcranmer »

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?

No, English is a Germanic language whose conjugation rules have severely atrophied, with (mostly specialized!) terminology liberally adopted from Latin, Greek, and other roots. In things like tense and aspect structure, I believe that English hews a lot closer to German than French.

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

#270

Post by YawningAngel »

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...

It's not a conjugation issue. "Champagne" is letter-for-letter identical in both languages, but pronounced differently for phonotactic reasons
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