Germans decry influence of English as 'idiot's apostrophe' gets approval • Hacker News Board

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

#441

Post by hibbelig » Wed, Oct 09, 2024, 9:17 PM UTC

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

It’s autocomplete being based on words. It knows computer and it knows keyboard and so in English it is trivial to type computer keyboard.

In German it also knows Computer and Tastatur, but I can’t use autocomplete to type Computertastatur.

Actually I just learned I can. Apparently this word is in the dictionary. But there are just so many compound nouns, it’s impossible for them all to be in the dictionary.

To make it work in such a language it has to understand about constructing compound nouns.

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

#442

Post by schroeding » Wed, Oct 09, 2024, 9:18 PM UTC

majewsky wrote: post #416

int_19h wrote: post #374

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…

This is true now - it definitely wasn't in the past, especially until the 80s. My mother was still beaten (!) as a child by her teacher in Munich when she spoke too Bavarian. Eradication of dialect was the goal at the time, Hochdeutsch the only thing acceptable.

(But the reason was people thinking it's a "Bildungshindernis", a roadblock in the pursuit of knowledge, like if people speaking dialect were mentally challenged - not national unity)

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

#443

Post by vidanay » Wed, Oct 09, 2024, 9:20 PM UTC

bunderbunder wrote: post #336

saghm wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

This sounds very Midwestern to me. Where I come from that would happen a lot. It wasn't necessarily that people didn't know the real name of the place. It functioned more like an inflection that helps to distinguish between the company, and a specific storefront operated by that company. Compare it to the distinction between "Alice" and "Alice's". Alice is the person, and Alice's is her house. For example, you you'd…

I've got ten bucks that says you've shopped for groceries at "Jewels"

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

#444

Post by BeretEnjoyer » Wed, Oct 09, 2024, 9:31 PM UTC

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?

It's not unclear at all without the apostrophe, because in German, compound words are written without spaces. If it was indeed a bar that specialized in a drink called "Rosis", it would be spelled "Rosisbar". The space makes it immediately apparent that it's a bar operated by someone called Rosi.

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

#445

Post by isametry » Wed, Oct 09, 2024, 9:32 PM UTC

pronik wrote: post #423

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…

> which by its whole design and intention is supposed to be written before the number (€50,00)

What makes you think that? The intention of the € symbol is to be used exactly like other currency notations before it in each respective language. In English it’s before the number, but in many others including German, it is after (50,00 DM).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euro_sign#Use

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

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

#446

Post by jjk166 » Wed, Oct 09, 2024, 9:43 PM UTC

inkcapmushroom wrote: post #142

jjk166 wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That one's a bit mean given that data does have a distinct plural, it just happens to be spelled the same because whoever came up with english didn't really grok the phonetic alphabet.

Datum is the singular, which is one point of data. When you group together a datum with another datum, they become data.

Data can be used as a plural or as a mass noun. When it is a mass noun it is treated as singular. Hence we say "data is hard to come by" versus "data are hard to come by."

Also datums is the plural of datum when it is used in an engineering sense, which is the most likely place one would still encounter it.

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

#447

Post by orwin » Wed, Oct 09, 2024, 9:43 PM UTC

cafard wrote: post #198

orwin wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

'deconstruction' in the French theory was only use by Derrida as a mean to critique a literary work. What it means is that you only judge the works by itself. You should not judge it by the standards of the time you read it, nor by the standard of the time it was written, nor by its author life. You judge it by its internal contradictions, its hypocrisy. Your external knowledge should have no impact on how you judge…

I did not say that deconstruction was pollution. I do think that many of a generation of American scholars found it hard to write or think other than in terms worked out in Paris between the mid-1950s and the early 1970s. I used the word "polluting" in referring to American thought as influencing French, and that perhaps was a little strong. What I had in mind is mentioned for example in https://www.bbc.com/news/worl…

yeah, sorry, i was talking about the "injuries to avenge".

> I do think that many of a generation of American scholars found it hard to write or think other than in terms worked out in Paris between the mid-1950s and the early 1970s.

None of the american scholars are postmodern, i'm pretty sure postmodernism died with the first Gulf war, or at least post 9-11 in France, on account on Baudrillard's book. It wasn't even really present in the US because in the US, Habermas and the Frankfurt school were way, way more popular than postmodernism, which was seen as unintelligible and way to complicated. Habermas wrote a virulent critique of postmodernism in "The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity", and that buried Foucault, Lyotard and a bit of Baudrillard in the US.

The fact that idiots who fake their knowledge in north America say that Postmodernism and Frankfurt school Critical theory are the same when they criticize each other so much the best arguments against PM is from Habermas and one of the only common point between all postmodern authors were their rejection of Hegel's dialectic and metanarratives (yeah, when said like this you might think Nietzsche was the first postmodern author) is fun. It is also really postmodern though.

What really grind my gears is that the same type of people who argue against "postmodernism" (that they don't understand) seems to understand how politics are linked with science and authority through at least the language (in my country, the "masks are useless, don't create shortage for nurses"/"masks are usefull, everybody should wear one" was a plain example of that). Which is _exactly_ what Lyotard describe in "the postmodern condition". They _totally_ agree with the single most postmodern book, they just don't know it. Which is fine. What is not fine is holding this opinion on science and politics then criticizing postmodernism for stuff it's not, or just broadly without explaining why. It shows that those shitheads don't know what they are talking about, they either didn't understand, or didn't read (i'm quite certain it's the second). The issue is when gullible, uninformed people believe them. Which was fine when it was americans, but now some French people believe it too and not only i have to fight those misconceptions online, i have to explain to people IRL how gullible they are and how idiotic their favorite anglo podcaster is.

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

#448

Post by kps » Wed, Oct 09, 2024, 9:51 PM UTC

p3rls wrote: post #307

What bothers me is when people confuse ` grave accents with apostrophes ', to the grammar gulags with the lot of 'em.

I have seen people use commas. Don,t do that.

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

#449

Post by int_19h » Wed, Oct 09, 2024, 9:55 PM UTC

School-Cotton wrote: post #438

int_19h wrote: post #430

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I think it's disingenuous to describe actively forcing people to speak and write language other than their preferred one as "a bit of an extra push".

Speaking more broadly, languages aren't persons and so they don't have rights; people do. Francophone Quebecois should have the right to live in a society in which knowledge of French alone doesn't put one at a significant immediate disadvantage, but I don't think there's a right to not be offended by use of other languages around them, or to force other people to switch their primary language.

In the context of the sign law, regulations on absolute legibility of French text would be sufficient to achieve the former goal, while the actual law that Quebec has is about the latter - that is the whole point of the "extra push". If anything, I would say that that is a good example of hardcore nationalism, actually, because it places the interests of the abstract generalized nation over the interests of concrete people who live there.

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

#450

Post by int_19h » Wed, Oct 09, 2024, 10:02 PM UTC

schroeding wrote: post #442

majewsky wrote: post #416

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This is true now - it definitely wasn't in the past, especially until the 80s. My mother was still beaten (!) as a child by her teacher in Munich when she spoke too Bavarian. Eradication of dialect was the goal at the time, Hochdeutsch the only thing acceptable. (But the reason was people thinking it's a "Bildungshindernis", a roadblock in the pursuit of knowledge, like if people speaking dialect were mentally challe…

Sometimes one is really just a shibboleth for the other. I grew up in Russia, and my native Southern Russian dialect was similarly derided as "uneducated peasant speech" by some schoolteachers, with a similar subtext - that, ironically, in an area where that dialect is predominant. But then you see the same argument applied to Ukrainian and Belarusian (that share some of the distinctive features) and realize that it's not just about being a "roadblock in pursuit of knowledge", even if that is used as a convenient justification that people might even genuinely believe in themselves when they use it - because they, in turn, were culturally conditioned to accept it as valid. It doesn't really make much sense as a reason when you think about it objectively, though.