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

#461

Post by crazygringo » Wed, Oct 09, 2024, 11:30 PM UTC

thangalin wrote: post #456

crazygringo wrote: post #352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 p…

> many documents containing information that can not be parsed unambiguously

Well, and I'd suggest the unambiguous information was usually never there in the first place. It's less of an encoding problem, and more of an input "problem". People type either a single quote/apostrophe, or a double quote, and let smart quotes sort it out.

And sure, smart quotes will fail spectacularly with your spectacularly pathological example! Heck, it took me a few seconds to figure out what on earth was going on with the first 5 characters. :)

Your example would usually be typeset properly in a physical published book because it's done with professionals manually reviewing the typography.

Just throw it in the bucket of hyphens vs. minuses vs. dashes em and en, x's versus multiplication signs... our symbols are full of ambiguities, it's not just apostrophes.

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

#462

Post by wkat4242 » Thu, Oct 10, 2024, 12:04 AM UTC

riedel wrote: post #425

dingnuts wrote: post #415

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah the same in Dutch. Though we don't really care so much about mixing English customs with Dutch. In Germany the language purity seems to be a much hotter topic. In Holland we're pretty pragmatic about it. If it works, go for it.

Personally I think our "language culture" is overrated and I wouldn't care if Dutch just disappeared completely in favour of English.

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

#463

Post by wkat4242 » Thu, Oct 10, 2024, 12:05 AM UTC

ktosobcy wrote: post #112

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…

I wouldn't mind for English to have "standardisation body" akin to French or German one (or RAE for Spanish) that could maybe get rid of backward, dumb spelling ;) (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English-language_spelling_refo... )

But which English? American and British English are substantially different. Spelling of many words, expressions, even the way quotation marks and periods are ordered.

I doubt either country will ever accept the other's version.

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

#464

Post by chrisdhoover » Thu, Oct 10, 2024, 12:44 AM UTC

jhoechtl wrote: post #407

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…

> E.g. Handy for smartphone For clarity, we already called them Handy when they were phones but not smart.

A handy means something entirely different in the US

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

#465

Post by carlosjobim » Thu, Oct 10, 2024, 1:32 AM UTC

DonHopkins wrote: post #351

xdennis wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> people suddenly realizing they were already recognizing genderless people without knowing it ;) Not true. It was used in the past to refer to an unknown person. I.e. "When a candidate arrives given them the test." You don't know what sex the candidate is before he arrives and instead of saying "he or she" you say "they". But nowadays people use it as a superclass of he and she: "I asked my boss for a raise but they…

No, it is used to signal the person's gender doesn't matter. Being angry about other people not fixating on gender by demanding everyone always explicitly define it with every pronoun is used as sexism signaling, which is what you're doing. You don't know why other people choose to use the words they do, yet you presume the worst and accuse people of being insincere and lacking virtue despite (and because of) their p…

What a comment...

The person you responded to is right. If you start mixing in "they" you're just confusing the listener, because they will assume you're now talking about some different people. I wouldn't have the patience to listen to somebody who speaks in that matter and deliberately makes their words cryptic.

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

#466

Post by nomilk » Thu, Oct 10, 2024, 1:49 AM UTC

dylan604 wrote: post #300

nomilk wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think I understand: I thought about trees: Tree leaves (leaves from a tree) Trees leaves (same but from more than one variety of tree) Same logic for water: Water edge (an edge that happens to be of a body of water) Waters edge (same but of more than one body of water)

> Tree leaves (leaves from a tree) or it could be the single tree is vacating the area > Trees leaves (same but from more than one variety of tree) or multiple trees are vacating the area we could equally turn edge into a verb as well. so now we have a whole other meaning outside of an apostrophe

Hadn't even considered that. I think that confirms "waters edge" can be grammatically correct. (random example: "as rain falls, flood waters edge closer")

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

#467

Post by falcor84 » Thu, Oct 10, 2024, 1:50 AM UTC

int_19h wrote: post #418

falcor84 wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I might regret saying it, but I think we as humanity should go back to wars being definitively won, rather than dragging on indefinitely. It's obviously a poor metaphor, but I'm thinking of something like the "Fifty-move rule" in chess - e.g. if no significant area changed sides in e.g. 100 days, then we officially redraw the maps (by treaty if possible), cease hostilities and let people rebuild and get on with their…

There's no authority that can enforce such a rule.

That's a good point. Maybe it could be handled like the Geneva conventions?

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

#468

Post by carlosjobim » Thu, Oct 10, 2024, 2:03 AM UTC

carlmr wrote: post #274

aeyes wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But I can style the name of my business however I want, "E'v'a's Blumenladen" is correct because I say so. I don't need anyones approval.

In Germany you need approval for business names.

Do you really? In other European countries you only need approval for your company name, but are free to use any business name(s) you prefer, as long as they're not trademarked.

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

#469

Post by kbrkbr » Thu, Oct 10, 2024, 2:25 AM 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…

That in turn sounds a lot like the latin locative case [1], which was a case next to dative, accusative etc. to indicate place.

[1] https://classics.osu.edu/Undergraduate-Studies/Latin-Program...

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

#470

Post by inkyoto » Thu, Oct 10, 2024, 3:02 AM UTC

tivert wrote: post #390

hosh wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wades-Giles is closer to English-friendly, but it has a lot of flaws. It has no notion of intonations. I think there is also the issue of cultural dominance. "English-friendly" means the foreign language is morphed to better suit English speakers. It could go the other way if Mandarin is the dominant trade language.

> I think there is also the issue of cultural dominance. "English-friendly" means the foreign language is morphed to better suit English speakers. It could go the other way if Mandarin is the dominant trade language. It's not an issue of cultural dominance, as no one would be forcing the Chinese to change their names or their pronunciations. It's basically just keeping English from being even more unmanageable, in a…

> Apparently the Xinhua decided to render "Trump" as 特朗普/Te Lang Pu (https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2017/01/25/china-d...), instead of doing the American/English thing of "You don't know their language? Well f-you then. No help from us."

Consider a rather unusual (but real nevertheless) Polish surname: «Brzęczyszczykiewicz». Most native English speakers, who are not well known for their patience with long and unusually looking non-native surnames, will instantly give up and shorten it to a mere «B». The most daring and adventurous ones will persevere and will likely arrive at something akin to «Brenshistishkevich», which is neither correct nor easily pronounceable for an English speaker anyway. The few English speakers who are acquainted with Polish, would render and pronounce «Brzęczyszczykiewicz» as «Bzhenchishchikyevich» which is closer to truth, yet it will confuse everyone else who will stick with «Brenshistishkevich» anyway.

Or consider an Icelandic surname of «Þórðarson». We would have «Thordarson» (as a naïve take) or «Thortharson» (somewhat closer to the actual Icelandic version).

Bonus point: Llanfairpwllgwyngyll, a Welsh surname, with the «colloquial» vocalisation of «Lanfarpwilgwingle» vs «Hlan-fair-pool-gwin-gith» (a more truthful rendition).

In all cases, with Brenshistishkevich, Thordarson and Llanfairpwllgwyngyll, we have arrived at the English equivalent of Te Lang Pu (Trump). In fact, there is no need to look at more extreme cases, it will suffice to consider a simple Vietnamese name of «Huy», which most English speakers will pronounce as «Hughey» whereas it is actually «Hwee» – it is still the case of the English Te Lang Pu.

In the case of Mandarin Chinese, the problem is exacerbated by the fact that the Chinese writing script is logographic and can't encode single consonants (single sounds in general, although there are Chinese characters that encode vowelled words, usually exclamations). Secondly (or firstly, in fact), all Chinese languages have a strict rule of a phoneme having the CV(C) structure (Consonant-Vowel(maybe another Consonant)), which makes the CCVCC (i.e. Trump) compound impossible and is completely against the phonetic rules of the language. And many, very many in fact, Chinese speakers neither know pinyin nor speak English. The same is true for many other non-Chinese languages.

It gets a bit better, e.g., in Japanese that, other than the logographic script, has two syllabaries that make it possible to represent Trump as something probably more like Tu-ru-mpu.

> I used to work with a man who's last name was Cao whose name was mispronounced "Cow" […]

Since you also earlier called out «[…] (e.g. do not use "c" for "ts", use the closest approximate for sounds that do no exist in English) instead of maximal fidelity to the foreign language», spelling Cao as Tsao (which is what they do in Taiwan but not in the mainland) is not going help as nearly all English speakers will drop the «t» and pronounce it as «Sao». And, since «ts» is one sound and not two, «Sao» is also the English Te Lang Pu.