Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

theguardian.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

401–410 of 576 posts

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

#401

Post by mikae1 »

chromanoid wrote: post #392
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…

I would say "Kati's Ecke" (urks) should look modern (and fails at that, looks like cargo cult to me) or is an unintentional error of the owner because they don't know better (maybe obligatory English lessons in school compromised the actual rules of German). I am sure it doesn't look exotic to most Germans. We actually use the apostrophe in cases where adding the possessive s is problematic. E.g. "Felix' Ecke" There…

> the Deppenleerzeichen which is a space between combined words that are usually and famously not separated by space in correct German.

We feel you over here in Sweden. Särskrivning (roughly “word splitting”) is a “problem” far greater than the apostrophes for us. Americentric Swedish Android keyboards are terrible offenders that happily splits words in two.

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

#402

Post by shafyy »

I also see many people using the % or "z. B." (zum Beispiel, meaning for example) wrongly in German. Corretly, the % should have a space like this: 10 %, not 10% (as it is in English). "z. B." also should have a space, but is often used as "z.B.", like the "e.g." in English.

However, as mentioned in the article, not clear to me if this is in fact because of the English influence or some other reason.

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

#403

Post by int_19h »

badmintonbaseba wrote: post #134
rafram wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No natural language is actually 100% phonetic. Romanian is no exception. Romanian spelling and pronunciation are close to phonetic, but the same is true of German.

Hungarian gets pretty close too, but yeah, there are exceptions.

Among European languages, Serbo-Croatian is probably the closest to phonemic spelling. An interesting way to test this is to train a basic language model on a representative language, and then see how many mistakes it makes on words it doesn't know (https://aclanthology.org/2021.sigtyp-1.1/) - in this study, Serbo-Croatian scored over 99% for both reading and writing accuracy. Finnish and Turkish are also pretty good.

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

#404

Post by layer8 »

ghayes wrote: post #195
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…

Is “search it up” much different from a similar phrase “search for it”? The structure of the original quote is “imperative verb, direct object, adverb” but I wouldn’t call that a change in grammar so much as a change in diction.

It’s adapted from “look it up”. Or maybe more specifically, it’s “look it up using internet search”.

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

#405

Post by layer8 »

amadeuspagel wrote: post #388

Compare: - Rosi's Bar - Rosis Bar With the first it's immidiately clear that Rosi is a woman's name and that the bar belongs to her. With the second it's not clear at all what Rosis is. Maybe some kind drink?

Or some unkind drink.

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

#406

Post by sltkr »

mppm wrote: post #246

For those interested, I highly recommend "The Unfolding of Language" by Guy Deutscher, in which he describes how languages evolve over time, to the great annoyance of purists, but without either losing or gaining sophistication in the long run. It's a very entertaining read and has considerably reduced my irritation at "incorrect" use of language.

For extra irony in this context: Deutscher means German in German.

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

#407

Post by jhoechtl »

chromanoid wrote: post #392
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…

I would say "Kati's Ecke" (urks) should look modern (and fails at that, looks like cargo cult to me) or is an unintentional error of the owner because they don't know better (maybe obligatory English lessons in school compromised the actual rules of German). I am sure it doesn't look exotic to most Germans. We actually use the apostrophe in cases where adding the possessive s is problematic. E.g. "Felix' Ecke" There…

> E.g. Handy for smartphone

For clarity, we already called them Handy when they were phones but not smart.

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

#408

Post by chromanoid »

mikae1 wrote: post #401
chromanoid wrote: post #392

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would say "Kati's Ecke" (urks) should look modern (and fails at that, looks like cargo cult to me) or is an unintentional error of the owner because they don't know better (maybe obligatory English lessons in school compromised the actual rules of German). I am sure it doesn't look exotic to most Germans. We actually use the apostrophe in cases where adding the possessive s is problematic. E.g. "Felix' Ecke" There…

> the Deppenleerzeichen which is a space between combined words that are usually and famously not separated by space in correct German. We feel you over here in Sweden. Särskrivning (roughly “word splitting”) is a “problem” far greater than the apostrophes for us. Americentric Swedish Android keyboards are terrible offenders that happily splits words in two.

> Americentric Swedish Android keyboards are terrible offenders that happily splits words in two.

This is how language evolves nowadays. :/

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

#409

Post by majewsky »

chromanoid wrote: post #392
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…

I would say "Kati's Ecke" (urks) should look modern (and fails at that, looks like cargo cult to me) or is an unintentional error of the owner because they don't know better (maybe obligatory English lessons in school compromised the actual rules of German). I am sure it doesn't look exotic to most Germans. We actually use the apostrophe in cases where adding the possessive s is problematic. E.g. "Felix' Ecke" There…

> "Kati's Ecke" (urks)

The worst I ever saw was an advertisement on a bar telling prospective patrons about the availability of "snacks´s". This is so wrong I can't even figure out how many distinct errors were made. (And yes, that's an acute accent, not an apostrophe.)

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

#410

Post by School-Cotton »

int_19h wrote: post #398
School-Cotton wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nothing like what you described exists in Canada. You are presumably referring to the OQLF (a provincial institution, not a “Canadian” one) which enforces French as the dominant public language in Quebec. Given that Quebec, despite being surrounded by the Anglosphere, hasn’t ended up like Louisiana or Ireland where French or Irish as the primary native language is a distant memory, suggests that their efforts are suc…

It is rather telling that Quebec had to repeatedly to use the "notwithstanding clause" of the Canadian Charter of Human Rights and Freedoms (which is basically a legal way for the province of saying "fuck you, we don't care about your pesky rights") to do that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_33_of_the_Canadian_Cha...

It’s also worth pointing out that Quebec was conquered by military force, has never agreed to be bound by the Canadian constitution, and follows it under duress.

Indeed they may be violating something that the Canadian constitution — a document they never agreed to — describes as a “right”. On the other hand, on the scale of human rights, the right of business owners to publicly display English-only signs is a rather weak one and reasonable people could debate whether it’s fundamental and inalienable.

Post reply on HN