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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

#381

Post by neaden »

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).

All non-Greek languages are barbarian, since apparently it sounds like we are saying barbarbar to the ancient Greeks.

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

#382

Post by freeone3000 »

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…

Living in Quebec, I see the perspective. It’s not that there is a particular hatred of english; there is simply an explicit exclusion of anything non-French. From such a perspective, it doesn’t matter if the One World Global Language is English or Cantonese or Esperanto, it must be fought against to preserve French

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

#383

Post by DonHopkins »

int_19h wrote: post #376
DonHopkins wrote: post #349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ex…

German seems even more obsessed with gender than English, and the exceptions (der Junge -vs- das Mädchen) seem to reveal its underlying assumptions and disrespect for reality in the ways it doesn't align with natural or biological gender, like refusing to assign gender to young females while imposing manhood on young boys, and bizarrely insisting on assigning arbitrary gender to inanimate objects.

Gendered pronouns and nouns are just a bunch of useless sexist baggage and linguistic friction that make languages much harder to learn, and uselessly complex, with more trivial arbitrary details to memorize or get wrong.

But all those gender-critical sex-obsessed people who make a big deal out of getting performatively offended and pretending to be confused by neutral pronouns, angrily insisting that every word possible explicitly defines a gender, are just weird.

The person doth protest too much, methinks.

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

#384

Post by jrootabega »

wolframhempel wrote: post #220

I feel that most people instinctively assume that some institution, e.g. the government or the dictionary publishers are the authority on what constitutes "correct language". It's important to emphasize that language (included spelling) is something that develops organically and that the role of these institutions is just to capture the status quo. At least that should be the case in free societies. Language is power…

Maintaining correctness of language is not inherently a limitation of freedom. You are free to be incorrect in a free society. No one is entitled to respect for being incorrect in a free society. It IS possible to abuse authority over language to exert unfair control, but they are not always the same thing.

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

#385

Post by int_19h »

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.

Slavic is somewhat more conservative and still has a bunch of archaic proto-Slavic and even proto-Indo-European stuff in it. Even most of the basic swearwords are still readily recognizable from PIE, which I always found particularly amusing:

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Slavic/x...

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Slavic/p...

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Slavic/j...

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Slavic/b...

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Slavic/g...

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

#386

Post by criddell »

wolframhempel wrote: post #220

I feel that most people instinctively assume that some institution, e.g. the government or the dictionary publishers are the authority on what constitutes "correct language". It's important to emphasize that language (included spelling) is something that develops organically and that the role of these institutions is just to capture the status quo. At least that should be the case in free societies. Language is power…

Lots of people try to police English as well. It wasn't that long ago whenever any use of "begs the question" to mean "raises the question" would get plenty of reaction from the prescriptivists. Fortunately, that war seems to have ended.

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

#387

Post by int_19h »

bitwize wrote: post #210
Supernaut wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In certain academic circles, it's been popular for several decades now to exhibit indifference to the general decline in observance of rules such as this. I find that attitude very regrettable. I can't be the only person who has found themselves having to repeatedly re-read a passage of text to discern its meaning, because the author is ignorant of, or indifferent to the use of apostrophes and/or other forms of punct…

My wife still fumes that they don't make kids type two spaces after sentence-terminal punctuation anymore. And she still hasn't processed that periods at the end of sentences are, in certain contexts, considered inappropriately arrogant and to be avoided.

I can see how "unnecessary" periods could be considered excessively formal in some contexts like texting, but ... arrogant?

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

#389

Post by alistairSH »

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…

...it drives me crazy when I hear people refer to Pizzeria Uno as "Uno's"

Pedant Alert! The chain's name is "Uno Pizzeria & Grill".

You're not wrong, but the actual ordering of the name makes it less clear to a casual observer that there is no person named "Uno".

And the domain the company uses is "unos.com", so at the corporate entity has accepted the name.

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

#390

Post by tivert »

hosh wrote: post #313
tivert wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Pinyin is pretty good at rendering Manderin in a Latin script. It's pretty good for Mandarin speakers . It's terrible for English speakers. > Can you elaborate on what you mean by “English-friendly”? English friendly is something that will produce reasonably-close approximate pronunciations by an English reader without any extra foreign-language training. Basically, something that prioritizes following existing Eng…

Wades-Giles is closer to English-friendly, but it has a lot of flaws. It has no notion of intonations. I think there is also the issue of cultural dominance. "English-friendly" means the foreign language is morphed to better suit English speakers. It could go the other way if Mandarin is the dominant trade language.

> I think there is also the issue of cultural dominance. "English-friendly" means the foreign language is morphed to better suit English speakers. It could go the other way if Mandarin is the dominant trade language.

It's not an issue of cultural dominance, as no one would be forcing the Chinese to change their names or their pronunciations. It's basically just keeping English from being even more unmanageable, in a way many other languages do, including Chinese.

If an English name or other word is used in Chinese (or in Japanese, or many other languages) it gets localized. For instance, watch this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ix2xYvMcW2A. The Chinese speakers are mostly talking about Trump, but the only name I could actually pick out was Obama's (probably because "Trump" is hard to pronounce in Chinese).

Apparently the Xinhua decided to render "Trump" as 特朗普/Te Lang Pu (https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2017/01/25/china-d...), instead of doing the American/English thing of "You don't know their language? Well f-you then. No help from us."

Also, the English use of Pinyin can have some unfortunate effects. I used to work with a man who's last name was Cao whose name was mispronounced "Cow" almost 100% of the time (there was a strong preference for first-name use in the office, so it rarely happened to his face).

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