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

theguardian.com

431–440 of 576 posts

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

#431

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 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.

The plural would regularly be Hopkinses in English. If I invited your family over, I would say the Hopkinses are coming. If I was going to your family's house, I would say I'm going to the Hopkinses' house. If you specifically were giving me a ride in your car, I'd say we're taking Don Hopkins's car.

It's not a big mystery or even particularly complicated, all regular rules of pluralization and the possessive case. I think people get tripped up in school because they see a specific affectation of dropping the S from possessive forms of the names of some historical personages, e.g. "in Jesus' name."

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

#432

Cocorico! France to the rescue! We anticipated that the British or Americans would try to sneakily introduce their words about computers so we appointed a group of 70-something-years-old literature experts to create the proper words to use for computer stuff. They came up with novel words that made us the laughingstock of the Western world and that nobody wanted to use. The state organizations were forced to, so for…

In spirit, this kinda reminds me of the Czech chemical nomenclature – large parts of it (including original names for many elements) were designed pretty much single-handledly by natural scientist Jan Svatopluk Presl.

This was part of the Czech National Revival: a huge movement in the 1800s to prevent Czech language and culture to die out under the German/Austrian influence. During that time, the vocabulary saw a boom of new, original words (including ridiculous ones) to combat Germanisms at all cost.

And so to this day, a portion of the Czech periodic table has unique naming of elements, completely unrelated to their Latin counterparts.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Czech_chemical_nomenclature

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

#433

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Yeah, apparently it makes you come off as a know-it-all in texting or DMing,and is therefore considered rude.

FWIW I think that anyone who seriously believes this needs to be told to just go fuck themselves, so if they choose to treat such style as "rude" and get offended, perhaps it's for the best after all.

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

#434

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…

Oh no not the heckin' pejoratives

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

#435
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)?

I've also heard people saying "Aldi's" in the US.

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

#436

Cocorico! France to the rescue! We anticipated that the British or Americans would try to sneakily introduce their words about computers so we appointed a group of 70-something-years-old literature experts to create the proper words to use for computer stuff. They came up with novel words that made us the laughingstock of the Western world and that nobody wanted to use. The state organizations were forced to, so for…

In spirit, this kinda reminds me of the Czech chemical nomenclature – large parts of it (including original names for many elements) were designed pretty much single-handledly by natural scientist Jan Svatopluk Presl. This was part of the Czech National Revival: a huge movement in the 1800s to prevent Czech language and culture to die out under the German/Austrian influence. During that time, the vocabulary saw a boo…

I think this is similar in Polish - I believe there are different suffixes depending on the level of (IIRC this was for some compounds of Fe)

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

#437

What they need is learn from Canada and have a language police. Go around and fine business that don't follow the rules of German properly.

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…

The language police are mentioned on page 65 of "Solomon Gursky Was Here" by Mordecai Richler, published 1989:

The lot outside The Caboose, punctured with potholes, overlooked a lush meadow lined with cedars. There were picnic tables out there as well as an enormous barbecue, the engine a salvage job done on an abandoned four-stroke lawn mower. Sundays in summer the truculent and hungover Rabbit would turn up at seven A.M. to begin roasting a pig or a couple of shoulders of beef for the community dinner, all you could eat for five bucks, proceeds to The Old Folks Home in Rock Island. The Rabbit was once dismissed for pissing in the fire. "People was looking and it puts them off their feed." He was fired again for falling asleep in the grass after guzzling his umpteenth Molson and failing to notice that the spit hadn't been revolving properly for more than an hour. Then he beat up an inspector from the Commission de la Langue Francaise outside The Thirsty Boot on the 243. According to reports the inspector had ordered The Thirsty Boot to take down their sign and replace it with a French one. "Sure thing," the Rabbit had said, kneeing the inspector in the groin, just to cut him down to his own height before laying into him. "We're gonna put up a pepper sign all right. Only it's gonna read 'De Tirsty Boot'." After that he could do no wrong.

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

#438

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Fren…

> The CHRF rights that they circumvented "notwithstanding" are pretty generic and commonly recognized human rights

And yet, the examples you posted don't really sound like serious human rights violations to me. So perhaps they are being interpreted expansively by Canadian jurisprudence.

> using genealogy to decide which children may or may not attend English-language schools.

Lots of places only let you attend school in the official language. So by letting people who are part of the Anglophone community (i.e., born to Anglophone parents, I guess what you're calling genealogy) attend English-language schools they're making _more_ concessions to the Anglophone minority than is generally accepted as required by human rights. I certainly don't see anyone in the political mainstream claiming that France is committing human rights violations by refusing to set up public schools in languages other than French.

> 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

It is not petty revenge. Well, maybe it is for some hardcore nationalists. But the more charitable interpretation, that French needs a bit of an extra push (beyond just requiring equal exposure as English) in order to withstand the huge pressure from the surrounding Anglosphere, is reasonable.

> 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.

I agree with you here. Indigenous people should be able to protect their culture from the dominant surrounding Franco-Quebec culture just like Franco-Quebecers should be allowed to protect their own from the dominant surrounding Anglosphere, and I unreservedly criticize the Quebec government as hypocrites for not allowing them to.

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

#439

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 a…

German has grammatic gender for all nouns, so it is consistent in that regard, at least. I also don't like novel ungendered forms for languages like Spanish ("latinx" etc) for the same reason - they stick out like a sore thumb because they don't fit the overall feel of the language where gender is already a pervasive concept. It's kinda like taking a statically typed language and introducing completely new syntax to omit the type in one very specific case, but not all the others.

But English nouns are already ungendered with very few exceptions. Pronouns are also all ungendered except third person singular, so there's a much stronger case here for eliminating the exception in contexts where it really doesn't contribute anything useful.

As far as getting offended, I think one has to distinguish between the person getting misgendered being offended themselves vs people getting offended "on behalf" of others (who might actually be rather offended at such misrepresentation of what they actually want). E.g. with Spanish it's far more common for native English speakers to be adamant about "-x", while many native Spanish speakers actively dislike it.

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

#440

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

As a German, I don't think this applies to Germany all that much. For example, multiple German states have enshrined in their constitutions a specific protection for several minority languages (mostly Germanic languages like Low German or Danish, but also the Slavic language of Sorbian that's native to Brandenburg and Saxony). If anything, the state and county governments are working to preserve those local varieties…

Things are generally better today than they used to be in most places, but historically Germany did plenty of that (and I don't just mean the Nazis!), and that kind of history has very long term effects even once policy changes.
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