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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

#421

Post by nmeofthestate »

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.

Good point - maybe you're right and just I'm a gender-obsessed sexist. Thanks.

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

#422

Post by AStonesThrow »

neaden wrote: post #381
WalterBright wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Imagine how those Greeks resented scribes trying to separate words and phrases with spaces on precious vellum!

Those crazy Masoretic Jews trying to pollute sacred texts with vowels... You're just supposed to know them!

Punctuation was probably introduced by leaky quills dripping until someone put a positive spin on it.

What twist of fate gave us ampersands? Lets keep Ye Olde English pure! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorn_(letter)#Modern_English

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

#423

Post by pronik »

shafyy wrote: post #402

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.

Sometimes, those rules just don't make any sense. I'm especially amused about the euro sign in German which by its whole design and intention is supposed to be written before the number (€50,00), but is instead written behind the number with a space included (50,00 €). The former looks way better and more concise for me, but maybe the reason is just a historical one, the Germans have been writing "50 DM" for decades after all.

On a different note, it's somewhat amusing that "i.e.", "e.g." and "etc." are considered English without any clear alternative in the language, while otherwise Latin-loving Germans haven't adopted those at all (in fairness, "d.h.", "bspw." and "usw." are just fine and I appreciate it when real German is used consistently).

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

#424

Post by int_19h »

inglor_cz wrote: post #85
helpfulContrib wrote: post #4

German is not that easy, either, though. Das/Der/Die is a constant source of frustration. Its never easy to remember.

It is doubly so if your native language is also a gendered one, but with different genders for common objects. It makes a mess in your head. CZ: ten nůž (masc.) - DE: das Messer (neutr.) - EN: knife CZ: ten svět (masc.) - DE: die Welt (fem.) - EN: world CZ: ta žába (fem.) - DE: der Frosch (masc.) - EN: frog Also, personified Death and rivers seem to be masculine-coded in Germanic languages, and feminine-coded in Slav…

It also doesn't help when words in a single language that can refer to the same thing have different grammatical genders (e.g. месяц vs луна).

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

#425

Post by riedel »

dingnuts wrote: post #415
mikae1 wrote: post #401

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

can you explain the mechanism by which a swedish language keyboard becomes Americentric? If they train the predictive text function on swedish text, I don't know why it would do English-y things, and if they didn't train it on Swedish how does it work at all? It's very surprising, and interesting, to me that this category of problem, in this particular context, is even possible

I also split incorrectly German compounds because it makes autocomplete simply much more usable. IMHO a soft break +backspace key would be needed on the android keyboard to make predictions usable in compound languages.

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

#426

Post by normie3000 »

colechristensen wrote: post #370
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…

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.

> we just spell it "wrong", likely out of French/Norman influence

Could it be that we spell it differently because the word was adopted before spelling was standardised in either language?

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

#427

Post by inglor_cz »

int_19h wrote: post #424
inglor_cz wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is doubly so if your native language is also a gendered one, but with different genders for common objects. It makes a mess in your head. CZ: ten nůž (masc.) - DE: das Messer (neutr.) - EN: knife CZ: ten svět (masc.) - DE: die Welt (fem.) - EN: world CZ: ta žába (fem.) - DE: der Frosch (masc.) - EN: frog Also, personified Death and rivers seem to be masculine-coded in Germanic languages, and feminine-coded in Slav…

It also doesn't help when words in a single language that can refer to the same thing have different grammatical genders (e.g. месяц vs луна).

For extra spiciness, try the same word in all three genders, with different meanings in each one:

DE:

der Band ... volume (as in "the second volume in a collection of books")

die Band ... group (as in "the Beatles are a group")

das Band ... ribbon

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

#428

Post by fy20 »

oersted wrote: post #281
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…

This has historically been the philosophy of English linguists, but for many languages (Spanish, French, German…) there is a central institution that does indeed decide what is officially correct. Their decisions are taken seriously and are intentionally propagated anywhere where language is used in a somewhat official context (not just in public institutions). True they adapt the standard over time following common…

This is especially important for smaller languages, as otherwise the effect of globalisation means that by-default they would just use the foreign (typically English) word. These institutions are responsible for maintaining the culture of the language.

For example in Lithuanian, an "influencer" is colloquially called "influenceris". But in Lithuanian "influence" translates to "įtakos", so it isn't anywhere close to correct.

The terms "įtakdarys" (influence maker) or "nuomonės formuotojas" (opinion shaper) would be a more Lithuanian version, as they are based on existing Lithuanian words. However in this case "influenceris" rolls off the tounge a lot easier, so maybe it is acceptable to be used.

The purpose of these institutes is to decide which is the correct word to use.

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

#429

Post by pronik »

German is a funny language. To be speaking and writing proper German you need to learn all of German, but in addition to that, you'd need Latin grammar to build some plurals, English, French and to lesser extent Italian and Turkish pronunciation for a ton of words, understanding of English idioms, since marketing and movies don't bother with translating taglines anymore, and quite a bit more. It's especially noticeable when you have little kids and have to correct them constantly when they are trying their newly acquired reading skills on billboards along the road.

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

#430

Post by int_19h »

School-Cotton wrote: post #410
int_19h wrote: post #398

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The CHRF rights that they circumvented "notwithstanding" are pretty generic and commonly recognized human rights, not something that the Anglos invented specifically for Canada.

And it was far more extensive than shop signs, but e.g. using genealogy to decide which children may or may not attend English-language schools. Although even wrt shop signs, you're still omitting important details - forcing shops to put French on signs is not unreasonable per se, but forcing them to make it larger than English even in cases where French is already perfectly visible and legible (i.e. beyond an obvious utilitarian purpose) is just petty revenge.

I also have to remind that the French are themselves colonial settlers in Canada, and that the requirement that French must be the "predominant language" on signs also applies to bilingual French/Native signs outside of official reservations.

In general, just because someone has been oppressed historically doesn't mean that they can't become oppressors themselves when they have the political power to do so. Quebec is not unique in that regard.

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