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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

#451

Post by orwin »

orwin wrote: post #447
cafard wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 eve…

I'll also link something i have in my pockets, because _I want_ people to understand how brilliant and ahead of their time Lyotard and Baudrillard were (and talking about them as if they "injured" anything is nonsense). It's a 5-10 minute read, in english, and probably the best, shortest resource ever to understand postmodernism (it's kind of inaccurate though, but i don't want to nitpick when it's a 100 times better than what you read elsewhere):

https://www.webpages.uidaho.edu/~sflores/KlagesPostmodernism...

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

#452

Post by bonoboTP »

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…

€ is a unit. Would you write you're ft6 tall or weigh lbs170 or that it's °F77 outside?

The weird and exceptional thing is rather that $ is put before the number, which is out of step with pronunciation.

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

#453

Post by tim333 »

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 also appears in their German website https://pizzeriaunoffm.de/ "Uno's Pizza Explore Our Delicious Pizza" and USA https://restaurants.unos.com/locations/NY/New_York

I don't think there's a particular rule that a number can't act as a name like 007's movies. Or that the thing possessing has to be a person, eg. England's weather.

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

#454

Post by makeitdouble »

WalterBright wrote: post #288
makeitdouble wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If we're going for accuracy, your statement would have to explain how it goes for other situations, for instance: - words spoken by toddlers: what's the spelling of a word that doesn't exist outside of a kid's brain ? In particular parents can accept it as a word without ever setting an associated writing. - written words that don't have a pronounciation: typically Latin is dead and how any of it is pronounced is up…

> typically Latin is dead and how any of it is pronounced is up to how we feel about it. How words were pronounced can be deduced from poetry.

That gives an hint on which words had similar endings, but there's still a chance we're wrong about how these endings sound in the first place.

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

#455

Post by tim333 »

FroshKiller wrote: post #431
DonHopkins wrote: post #362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

In practice there seems to be some variation in how people write it. Wikipedia has "List of Anthony Hopkins performances" Guardian has "Anthony Hopkins' 20 best film performances – ranked!". The s's seems rarer but the Irish Times has "Anthony Hopkins's new prestige".

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

#456

Post by thangalin »

crazygringo wrote: post #352
thangalin wrote: post #337

UNICODE and ASCII apostrophes are a bit absurd. For KeenQuotes[1], my library to automatically curl straight quotes, there's an Apostrophe type that defines variations on how to convert a straight apostrophe to a curled one. The main issue is that most suggestions are to use ’, which isn't semantically correct[2], and at one point Michael Everson noted, "the alphabetic property should be restored to U+02BC"[3].…

But Unicode code points aren't supposed to represent semantics, they're supposed to represent... well, "abstract characters" that are either glyphs or get combined into glyphs, which can have multiple (ambiguous) semantic meanings. That's why there aren't two different period characters to represent the end of a sentence vs. a decimal point, or two different em dashes where one represents a pause while the other come…

Thanks for shedding a little more light. Ignoring the semantics, in this case, between an apostrophe and a right single quote has resulted in many documents containing information that can not be parsed unambiguously because we have to pick a glyph and doing so with an ambiguously defined glyph loses contextual information.

As a side-effect, since GPTs are based on the examples we give, they can't encode the proper punctuation for many phrases that use British English quotation mark styles, making them unable to "curl" the quotation mark properly. For example, none can curl this paragraph correctly:

    ''E's got a 'ittle box 'n a big 'un,' she said, 'wit' th' 'ittle 'un 'bout 2'×6". An' no, y'ain't cryin' on th' "soap box" to me no mo, y'hear. 'Cause it 'tweren't ever a spec o' fun!' I says to my frien'.
The other downside to using ' or ' is that most fonts treat them as straight quotes, making for "improper" English typography when typeset into a book.

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

#457

Post by WalterBright »

makeitdouble wrote: post #454
WalterBright wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> typically Latin is dead and how any of it is pronounced is up to how we feel about it. How words were pronounced can be deduced from poetry.

That gives an hint on which words had similar endings, but there's still a chance we're wrong about how these endings sound in the first place.

> but there's still a chance we're wrong

Of course. But it's not like we know nothing about it.

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

#458

Post by Terr_ »

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…

> lingua-franca

Aside: I used to assume the term referred to how French was once "the language of diplomacy", but it really comes from "Frankish", at a time when "Franks" was a broad term for peoples of what is now western Europe.

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

#459

Post by tim333 »

Of possible relevance - last week's SMBC comic on English being partly of French and German origin https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/arthur

Which as a Brit I found quite interesting - I didn't realise the early language of Britain was Common Brittonic before reading that. It got displaced by English and it's closest descendant in the UK is Welsh.

It's sort of ironic that after Brittonic was largely wiped out by Germanic settlers, we now send back apostrophes to annoy them.

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