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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

#321

Post by int_19h »

samatman wrote: post #239
deng wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But this is not even about language, it's about spelling. For some reason, people forget that these are entirely different things. We are currently communicating in a language where there's often times no relation between the written and spoken word at all.

A more accurate statement is that English is a language where spelling often reflects history and etymology, rather than phonetics. There's always a relation between a spoken word and its written representation, they're the same thing in different mediums.

That's not uncommon in general, but English is a particularly bad instance of that, partly because it has so many prominent source languages with widely different spellings, and partly because of the lack of any significant spelling reforms for a very long time.

There was an interesting study (https://aclanthology.org/2021.sigtyp-1.1/) where they evaluated phonemicity of various language orthographies by training a neural net and then seeing how accurately it could predict things. Of two dozen languages they had there, the only ones that scored worse for writing are French and Chinese, but most notably, English is the only one that scored below 50% accuracy for reading, and with a significant gap at that. This is very unfortunate for an international language, since reading is kind of the most basic practical thing you can usually do with a second language.

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

#324

Post by Wytwwww »

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.

Also Ancient Greek, Albanian, Sanskrit, Ancient Iranian etc. Supposedly even "timber" (in English) is somehow derived from the the same root ..

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

#325

Post by aiforecastthway »

saghm wrote: post #302
crazygringo wrote: post #264

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", rathe…

> 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]. For whatever reason, it drives me crazy when I hear people refer to Pizzeria Uno as "Uno's". I've had conversations about it multi…

The establishments are owned by a corporate person named "Uno Restaurant Holdings Corporation".

So calling it Uno's isn't inconsistent with how we talk about Walmart's stores or Google's website, for example.

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

#326

Post by int_19h »

chimeracoder wrote: post #124
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…

> There are also a measurable economical issues for non-English-native nations to have to use the de facto 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. > To my knowledge, the only proposal that gained some modest but significant results on that side over the last century is Esperanto. You know, the language agai…

Esperanto is indeed not culturally neutral (and was never supposed to be), but it's still vastly better in practice than other European languages precisely because of this overemphasis on Latin (and Greek) roots - because those are exactly the "fancy" words that tended to be borrowed most often historically even across language families.

Also, interestingly enough, Esperanto attracted more interest in some Asian countries - most notably, Japan - than in much of Europe.

I think the bigger problem with Esperanto is phonology. It's too heavy on affricates, including some relatively rare ones (e.g. phonemic "ts"), and the consonant clusters get pretty bad. For someone coming from a simple CV language, those are likely to be a bigger challenge than the word list.

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

#327

Post by [deleted] »

raverbashing wrote: post #74
oneeyedpigeon wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Different words. "His dog" means the dog belonging to him. "He's a dog" means "he is a dog".

> Different words Obviously I meant people don't write "he's" as the possessive form of he. Hence they shouldn't write it's as the possessive form of it.

[deleted]

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

#329

Post by jjtheblunt »

nicbou wrote: post #318
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…

Coming from Quebec, I understand why people are worried about their language being strangled out and their culture dying with it. For Quebec this has always been a threat. I live in Germany now. There are 10-15 times more German speakers in the DACH area than there are French speakers in Quebec. Even then, it’s weird that companies no longer bother translating their ads and slogans for the German-speaking market. It’…

I wonder if the spread of English is because it's like a barycenter pulled by multiple languages, so not too far afield if coming from any of those languages.

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

#330

Post by booleandilemma »

kemiller wrote: post #322

English takes influence from other languages left and right, but there's always someone salty when it goes the other way.

That dynamism English has is something that makes it such a great language, imo.
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