That's like changing the spelling of Espresso to Expresso
It's not, unless you are able to hear a difference between "Tea's Buchladen" and "Teas Buchladen".
It is because it's just giving in to the habit of some people.
Germans decry influence of English as 'idiot's apostrophe' gets approval
361–370 of 576 posts
Re: Germans decry influence of English as 'idiot's apostrophe' gets approval
#362The 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…
I never liked Hopkins', but Hopkins's is even worse, and Hopkin's is horrible. But how are you supposed to spell something that belongs to several Hopkinses's? This is why I never tried to start a restaurant chain.
Re: Germans decry influence of English as 'idiot's apostrophe' gets approval
#363Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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)?
I'm from northern Ohio (Cleveland area) and it's only reading this thread that I'm learning/realizing that the name "JCPenny" isn't plural or possessive. My family always called it "Penny's" too.
Re: Germans decry influence of English as 'idiot's apostrophe' gets approval
#364Re: Germans decry influence of English as 'idiot's apostrophe' gets approval
#365Having 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’…
>> Coming from Quebec, I understand why people are worried about their language being strangled out and their culture dying with it.
One of the most fascinating things I learned about language in college when I was working towards my degree in Anthropology, a graduate student who was my class did their Master's on the linguistic differences between European French and the French Canadian (specifically the Quebec version) versions of the language. She did extensive research on the origins of the language and why they diverged.
Absolutely fascinating work.
On a lighter note, I happened to play hockey with many, many Canadian players. My best friend was from Ottawa and everybody asked him if he spoke French and said he did and said, "Its like here, you feel like you're speaking French with a Kentucky accent." which always got a good laugh from our teammates.
Re: Germans decry influence of English as 'idiot's apostrophe' gets approval
#366Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not, unless you are able to hear a difference between "Tea's Buchladen" and "Teas Buchladen".
It is because it's just giving in to the habit of some people.
So I suppose you never gave in and you still vehemently write "bureau" instead of "Büro"?
It's just spelling. Also, please check your old Duden, Regel 16b, you will be surprised.
Re: Germans decry influence of English as 'idiot's apostrophe' gets approval
#367Earlier 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…
"c" for "ts" has a very long history in Latin script - pretty much all Slavic languages and many other Eastern European languages that use Latin use it in this manner, as does German in many cases. That's why it also has this meaning in Esperanto.
I do agree that the currently dominant English convention of adopting spelling from other languages (or their standard Romanization system) as is - or worse yet, dropping all the diacritics but keeping everything else as is - is misguided. But it doesn't help that English spelling can get very unwieldy when trying to spell something phonetically, especially across many dialects of English due to considerable variability in how things are pronounced. This has also caused problems - for an example of that, look at the still-common Korean Romanization of names such as "Park" which does not accurately represent the actual pronunciation if you pronounce it as an American would ("r" is silent - it reflects the non-rhotic British pronunciation, and was put there because the more straightforward "Pak" would tend to be pronounced incorrectly by a Brit).
Re: Germans decry influence of English as 'idiot's apostrophe' gets approval
#368Earlier 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.
> A more accurate statement is that English is a language where spelling often reflects history and etymology, rather than phonetics.
I hate that the past tense of "stay" is "stayed", but "say" is "said" and "pay" is "paid", which is often misspelled as "payed", which IS a word, but is unrelated to transferring money from one person to another.
Then you got all the ways "-ough" is pronounced. Thorough, enough, cough, through, thought, dough, drought..."-ough" is now looking like a completely nonsense letter sequence.
Re: Germans decry influence of English as 'idiot's apostrophe' gets approval
#369Earlier 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 ;) 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 dif…
It's not the character set that's the problem so much so as the set of phonemes. English just doesn't have the ʂ/ɕ distinction, and no amount of creative spelling choices can fix that. Other things are much more straightforward, tones aside.
Re: Germans decry influence of English as 'idiot's apostrophe' gets approval
#370The 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…
Words "creeping into English" is like what the entire language is all about.
If you take away the words brought in by immigrants and invaders there is very little recognizable left.
>I'm not exactly worrying about "Haus" creeping into English to replace "House"
It's literally already the same word, we just spell it "wrong", likely out of French/Norman influence.