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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

#371

Post by crucialfelix »

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).

Cutlery (fr), silverware (de)

I was taught that this is because the Normans pushed the Germanics out and up north. French dominated the royal court.

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

#372

Post by Wytwwww »

allemagne wrote: post #161

This makes me really curious how quickly German has actually evolved over time. My assumptions would be entirely informed from extrapolating from historical context and not knowing anything about German. So there was probably a lot of linguistic diversity before unification in 1870, then there would have been a standardization effort started by Bismarck (favoring the dialect predominantly spoken in Prussia) which wou…

> favoring the dialect predominantly spoken in Prussia

Was it though? Historically Low German was spoken in Brandenburg (and the rest of pre 1800s Kingdom of Prussia). Standard German is a High German language closely related to the dialects in Saxony/Thuringia etc. (thanks to Luther) and predates Prussia's status as a major German power by a few centuries or so.

Paradoxically in the 1600s and 1700s Prussia invested a lot of effort into replacing in replacing its local dialects with Standard German (which by modern standards was effectively an entirely foreign language to most people living there. I think technically even Dutch/Flemish might be closer to Standard German than Eastern Low German was).

Austrians, Bavarians etc. didn't really need to do the same since it was already much easier for them to 'learn' Standard German if they needed to (and of course its association with Protestantism played a role initially)

It's a bit like if Scotland replaced Scots with Shakespearean English, then proceeded to takeover the rest of Britain and moved its capital to Edinburgh.

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

#374

Post by int_19h »

schroeding wrote: post #261
Eddy_Viscosity2 wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Th…

Nation-states generally tend to be hostile towards dialects historically because they are seen as disruptive to "national unity", and in more extreme cases, as latent separatism. And it feels like, because larger nation-states usually have more history of separatism (having forcibly assimilated more distinct local cultures), they also tend to be more touchy about that.

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

#375

Post by ACow_Adonis »

sgerenser wrote: post #340
xp84 wrote: post #331

Earlier 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)?

The Australian English thing to do is to drop the apostrophe, use an optional creative contraction to make the phrase even shorter, and thereby turn the entire thing into a noun :)

I.e. Maccas vs McDonald's

Of course, the official website https://mcdonalds.com.au/about-maccas/maccas-story uses an apostrophe which is now making me have the same reaction as the Germans :( and makes me think it was run through some international filter :p outrageous!

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

#376

Post by int_19h »

DonHopkins wrote: post #349
nmeofthestate wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I just find it annoying that English is almost entirely gender neutral except for pronouns. It feels like a weird and unnecessary special case (I really don't need to be telling everyone what I believe their gender to be every time I address them!), so getting rid of that makes the language more consistent and uniform overall.

I just wish it didn't conflate singular and plural. But the convenience of broadening an existing pattern rather than inventing a completely new one still wins in the end.

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

#377

Post by int_19h »

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…

I do know what sex my boss is, but why should I be forced to restate it every time I reference them in a conversation? It feels rather less polite to the speaker to impose that need on them.

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

#378

Post by neaden »

MarkusWandel wrote: post #291
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.

Boy have they atrophied. Even as a German speaker in whose first language these words have current equivalents I'm not 100% certain when to use thou, thee, thy, thine etc. that still were part of the language at Shakespeare's time and have since been simplified into you/your/yours etc. But it's true, English takes this stuff in stride, with modernisms e.g. "sick" meaning something good gradually being incorporated in…

thou/you is formal and informal and the distinction largely depending on your relationship with the person and respective social ranks. There were times when one person (social superior) would use thou (informal) while the other (social inferior) was expected to use you (formal). So yeah, no hard and fast grammar rule on when to do it but would depend entirely on the culture and the speaker and listeners social position inside of it.

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

#379

Post by int_19h »

OJFord wrote: post #295
cdumler wrote: post #172

Being an old, grey beard, it's been interesting to see language change in my lifetime. Things I learned: * Third-person singular indefinite ("he or she") can be replaced with third-person plural ("they"). Of course, a lot of changes around recognizing gender. * Final punctuation within the quote at the end of sentence (Did you just say "what?") can be placed after the final quote if the quote is for a literal string…

> Double infinitives ("to try to eat") getting changed to an infinitive and conjunction ("to try and eat"). Or worse, 'to try eat', 'to go get', etc. It's very American to my ear, but it's certainly invading. Another corruption triple like that is to do something 'accidentally' / 'by accident' / 'on accident'.

"go" + verb is a specific idiom, but I can't say that "try eat" is common or widely accepted as correct in American English.

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

#380

Post by colechristensen »

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.

I think it has a lot more to do with the global British Empire pre-WWI followed by American dominance post WWII. Perhaps there's an argument that the success of both had at least a small contribution from the characteristics of the language.
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