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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

#341

Post by scheme271 »

ktosobcy wrote: post #112
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…

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... )

But those standardisation bodies often get ignored by most of the speakers. Language is a living thing that evolves and changes in spite of the dictates of academies. Also, with global usage, any given body is not going to be able to do much, e.g. a chilean spanish speaker won't care what the RAE says or a Quebecois would probably laugh at what the French language academy dictates.

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

#342

Post by Wytwwww »

ars wrote: post #308
rob74 wrote: post #168

> The new edition of the Council for German Orthography’s style guide [...] lists “Eva’s Blumenladen” (Eva’s Flower Shop) and “Peter’s Taverne” (Peter’s Tavern) as usable alternatives, though “Eva’s Brille” (“Eva’s glasses”) remains incorrect. So they didn't actually simplify it - they made it more complicated? But my single largest pet peeve with the original reform is that they "outlawed" the use of the English plu…

Can you explain what's different about Glasses vs Tavern, where it's allowed in one and not the other?

Supposedly names of businesses and/or public signs are required to comply with certain rules? Which isn't surprising considering the love Germans have for pointless bureaucracy...

So I guess this is some sort of a (certainly not arbitrary) compromise to appease both sides.

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

#343

Post by lolc »

Muromec wrote: post #237
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…

Why invent Esperanto if Dutch already exists and is the most reasonable European language to learn.

Finally a modest proposal to unite the European people.

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

#344

Post by penteract »

nomilk wrote: post #154
mattlondon wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But Waters Edge is totally fine if they mean "by the edge of the waters" and not "the edge belongs to the water". But hey, there are no rules or logic in English so have at it!

I think I understand: I thought about trees: Tree leaves (leaves from a tree) Trees leaves (same but from more than one variety of tree) Same logic for water: Water edge (an edge that happens to be of a body of water) Waters edge (same but of more than one body of water)

I'd add that "waters" doesn't need to mean more than one body of water. It can be used somewhat poetically to refer to water in a single body. First example I could find: https://biblehub.com/joshua/3-8.htm

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

#345

Post by locallost »

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…

They're not trying to seem foreign, it's what happens when a foreign culture starts spreading. In that sense McDonald's has certainly played its part, but mostly because a lot of people use rules like these somewhat subconsciously.

E.g. this

> The Deppenapostroph is not to be confused with the English greengrocer’s apostrophe, when an apostrophe before an ‘s’ is mistakenly used to form the plural of a noun (“a kilo of potato’s”)

This also happens in German these days even though in this context it makes almost no sense. And nobody is trying to copy McDonald's here.

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

#346

Post by cs702 »

xdennis wrote: post #211
cs702 wrote: post #100

Reading this, I come away with the impression that European languages today are evolving due to the influence of "Vulgar English" (the lowest common denominator of English spoken by the most people worldwide), analogously to how Romance languages like Spanish and French evolved in the past due to the influence of "Vulgar Latin."[a] --- [a] https://www.britannica.com/topic/Romance-languages

> 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".

I agree! Nothing I wrote disagrees with that:

The phrasing "evolved in the past due to the influence of" has a more expansive meaning than "influenced by."

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

#347

Post by gavindean90 »

jjtheblunt wrote: post #329
nicbou wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

My thoughts are that any language that can embed other languages in it has the capacity to be a global lingua franca. English was firstest with the mostest.

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

#348

Post by int_19h »

WalterBright wrote: post #287
jcranmer wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

English is a barbarian language with French nouns, as a result of the Norman conquest of England. Amusingly, using the French words is a signal to being upper class. Such as "purchase" (pourchacier) instead of "buy" (byan).

Or stuff like "cow" (from Old English) vs "beef" (from Old French). Which kinda makes sense when you consider who grew meet vs who ate it.

It's a pretty common thing worldwide, though. French played a similar role as upper class marker in many other countries that were influenced by it when France was at the peak of its global dominance. For Slavic languages, German also played this role at one point, and IIRC there is something similar historically with Chinese in areas in its cultural dominance.

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

#349

Post by DonHopkins »

nmeofthestate wrote: post #200
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

You're right - that has been around for a long long time. But I feel like I've seen a general increase in its usage that can make writing more ambiguous to parse. Like we already know the gender of someone being written about in a sentence, but they become referred to as "they" at random - it's a subtle effect. I'm talking about examples unrelated to "gender stuff" but perhaps that's what's made the usage more popula…

Maybe young (and/or non-sexist) writers just don't care or aren't obsessed with knowing and explicitly talking about someone's gender, when it has nothing to do with the message.

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

#350

Post by locallost »

Whether or not this is the correct way to handle it, I don't know, but this:

> ...lists “Eva’s Blumenladen” (Eva’s Flower Shop) and “Peter’s Taverne” (Peter’s Tavern) as usable alternatives, though “Eva’s Brille” (“Eva’s glasses”) remains incorrect

...is as German as it gets. We've made an exception to the rule that also has exceptions.

Either accept it as possible or not, this is just plain stupid.

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