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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

#331

Post by xp84 »

aiforecastthway wrote: post #325
saghm wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> calling it Uno's isn't inconsistent with how we talk about Walmart's stores calling it Uno's isn't inconsistent with how we talk about Walmart's stores or Google's website

No, calling it "Uno Corp's pizzeria" would be the equivalent. Nobody says they're "Going down to Walmart's" or "doing some research on Google's."

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

#332

Post by oersted »

marcellus23 wrote: post #311
oersted wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This has historically been the philosophy of English linguists, but for many languages (Spanish, French, German…) there is a central institution that does indeed decide what is officially correct. Their decisions are taken seriously and are intentionally propagated anywhere where language is used in a somewhat official context (not just in public institutions). True they adapt the standard over time following common…

> This has historically been the philosophy of English linguists It's not unique to English linguists, it's a tenet of modern linguistics in general. A language is defined by the way people actually speak. If that's influenced by a central organization, fine, but that does not contradict descriptivism at all. Someone studying a language should always study the way the language is spoken by real people, using prescrip…

I don't disagree, it is certainly not unique to English, and these central institutions do largely have a descriptivist attitude (although the French are known to be rather purist ;) ).

But there is a practical difference: textbooks and dictionaries in English have traditionally come from distributed institutions, which are eminent but none of them claims to be official, whereas for example in Spanish they all originate from or closely follow the standards of the Real Academia.

Sometimes unified standards have been artificially created, like for Basque or Mandarin, and in those cases prescriptivism is more dominant.

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

#333

Post by dbrueck »

makeitdouble wrote: post #243
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…

Mal: "We got work to do, dong ma?"

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

#334

Post by Wytwwww »

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…

> proliferation of LLM: that it will make reading communications from other workers less utterly painful.

By somehow magically inferring what the person was trying to say and padding it with pointless verbosity?

I'm afraid we'll need to wait for Neuralink 20.0 to solve this problem...

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

#335

Post by bradhanson »

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…

To be honest, even when going to the original Pizzeria Uno (or Due) I’ll probably still call it “Uno’s” ‘cause it’s a weird part of the Chicago dialect. We do the same thing for the grocery store Jewel-Osco, calling it “da Jewels”

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

#336

Post by bunderbunder »

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…

This sounds very Midwestern to me. Where I come from that would happen a lot. It wasn't necessarily that people didn't know the real name of the place. It functioned more like an inflection that helps to distinguish between the company, and a specific storefront operated by that company. Compare it to the distinction between "Alice" and "Alice's". Alice is the person, and Alice's is her house.

For example, you you'd say "JCPenney stock is up by 32 cents this week," but you'd also say, "I bought this shirt at Penney's."

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

#337

Post by thangalin »

UNICODE and ASCII apostrophes are a bit absurd. For KeenQuotes[1], my library to automatically curl straight quotes, there's an Apostrophe type that defines variations on how to convert a straight apostrophe to a curled one. The main issue is that most suggestions are to use ’, which isn't semantically correct[2], and at one point Michael Everson noted, "the alphabetic property should be restored to U+02BC"[3]. I've bucked the x27, U+2019, and rsquo trend with:

    /** No conversion is performed. */
    CONVERT_REGULAR( "'", "regular" ),

    /** Apostrophes become MODIFIER LETTER APOSTROPHE ({@code ʼ}). */
    CONVERT_MODIFIER( "ʼ", "modifier" ),

    /** Apostrophes become APOSTROPHE ({@code '}). */
    CONVERT_APOS_HEX( "'", "hex" ),

    /** Apostrophes become XML APOSTROPHE ({@code '}). */
    CONVERT_APOS_ENTITY( "'", "entity" );
Thoughts?

[1]: https://whitemagicsoftware.com/keenquotes/

[2]: https://tedclancy.wordpress.com/2015/06/03/which-unicode-cha...

[3]: http://www.unicode.org/L2/L1999/n2043.pdf

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

#338

Post by int_19h »

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…

Esperanto is still frustratingly complex with regard to phonemes for an international language. I think most speakers of many European languages don't realize just how complex their phonologies are on average. Slavic languages probably take the cake there with stuff like 5-consonant clusters that can even include sequences of plosives and affricates, but then you also have Germanic languages (and French!) with their insanely large vowel inventories. Compared to that, Esperanto is relatively simple, but when you look outside of Europe, having 3-consonant clusters or phonemic contrast between plosives and affricates at the same place of articulation (e.g. "t" vs "t͡s") is very unhelpful.

That said, it's still a massive improvement on English phonologically. Even if you only consider the simpler American varieties, the three-way æ/ɐ/ɑ distinction alone (as in bat vs but vs bar) is a huge WTF for anyone coming from a typical 5-vowel system. And then you have consonants like θ and ð that don't have clear 1:1 counterparts in most other languages, often not even as allophones of something else that you could point at.

Still, if you want to see what a more modern take on the concept might look like, I believe Globasa (https://www.globasa.net/eng) is the most active project along those lines. Of course, realistically, the likelihood of it actually being adopted as the universal language is effectively nil, but then that's also the case for Esperanto.

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

#339

Post by iforgotpassword »

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…

This is gonna sound a little pejorative, but I've seen it at barber shops and little stores where my bet would be on ignorance rather than intentionally trying to imply anything. The guy next door did it too so it must be right.

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

#340

Post by sgerenser »

xp84 wrote: post #331
aiforecastthway wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> calling it Uno's isn't inconsistent with how we talk about Walmart's stores calling it Uno's isn't inconsistent with how we talk about Walmart's stores or Google's website No, calling it "Uno Corp's pizzeria" would be the equivalent. Nobody says they're "Going down to Walmart's" or "doing some research on Google's."

My grandmother would indeed refer to shopping at “WalMart’s” or “Penney’s”. Maybe a regional thing (she was from central PA)?
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