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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

#471

Post by saghm »

tim333 wrote: post #453
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…

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.

I'd argue this is less akin to calling Casino Royale "007's movie" but rather if you referred to the sequel to the Godfather as "Part II's movie". I suppose this is a bit of a philosophical question of whether the index of something is the same as the thing itself, but I think I fall in the camp that things exist distinct from the way we identify them, and names are just labels rather than some inherent part of the thing itself.

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

#472

Post by em-bee »

oniony wrote: post #131

I read somewhere that the apostrophe in English was only used to show elision, but that in Old English the genitive form changed the word ending to 'es', so the apostrophe was just indicating the 'e' had been removed. For example 'hund' (dog) becomes "hundes" in the genitive form and was written "hund's" when the 'e' was elided.

that's an interesting theory. it would go along with the contraction of not like in don't and also in is like in that's.

is there any other non-foreign use of ' that is not such a replacement?

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

#473

Post by em-bee »

zolbrek wrote: post #199
pjmlp wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone living here for the last 20 years, and also nowadays understands a bit of dialects and related slag, it is kind of curious the amount of Denglish words among the youth. For example, "Hast Du das geprüft?" quickly turns into "Hast du das gecheckt?".

I usually find it amusing. „Was meinst, kriegen wir das hin?“ „Safe Digga, das ist so was von easy.“ And they think they're so cool talking like that. The part that irritates me though is when I try to pronounce Denglish stuff with a German accent and the Germans end up not understanding me. I made a joke about strippers once and got only blank looks, then one guy said, "oh, you mean strippers," pronouncing it the wa…

Was meinst, kriegen wir das hin?

what's wrong with this sentence? or is it just context for the example?

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

#474

Post by em-bee »

rob74 wrote: post #168

> The new edition of the Council for German Orthography’s style guide [...] lists “Eva’s Blumenladen” (Eva’s Flower Shop) and “Peter’s Taverne” (Peter’s Tavern) as usable alternatives, though “Eva’s Brille” (“Eva’s glasses”) remains incorrect. So they didn't actually simplify it - they made it more complicated? But my single largest pet peeve with the original reform is that they "outlawed" the use of the English plu…

once a word is integrated in german, using german grammar rules seems perfectly fine. but if i read "parties" im a german sentence, i would feel surprised

however there are also plenty of counterexamples especially on the plural of foreign words, especially from latin, where a latin plural is expected.

what this suggests to me is that singular and plural have to be integrated separately.

"party" is essentially already a german word. "parties" isn't (yet)

"party" distinguishes itself from "feier" because the later means "celebration", where as "party" in german can be used for parties that don't celebrate anything.

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

#475

Post by ygra »

locallost wrote: post #345
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…

They're not trying to seem foreign, it's what happens when a foreign culture starts spreading. In that sense McDonald's has certainly played its part, but mostly because a lot of people use rules like these somewhat subconsciously. E.g. this > The Deppenapostroph is not to be confused with the English greengrocer’s apostrophe, when an apostrophe before an ‘s’ is mistakenly used to form the plural of a noun (“a kilo o…

It happens with other plural endings too ... the worst I've seen was Zwiebel’n. I'm not entirely sure how that one came into existence.

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

#476

Post by thangalin »

crazygringo wrote: post #461
thangalin wrote: post #456

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> let smart quotes sort it out.

Smart quotes fail in simple cases, too.

https://gitlab.com/DaveJarvis/KeenQuotes/-/tree/main/src/tes...

I've developed a lexer/parser that can disambiguate most cases, but wow was it a chore to write.

> Well, and I'd suggest the unambiguous information was usually never there in the first place.

Interesting. Isn't the text ambiguous because the glyphs lack the semantics to capture the usage of apostrophes versus closing single quotes? It's a Catch-22, isn't it? If UNICODE had semantics for apostrophes versus right single quotes, then our documents would be unambiguous. But we can't make them unambiguous because UNICODE doesn't capture these semantics.

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

#477

Post by konart »

int_19h wrote: post #414
xdennis wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not though. It's much more regular than english, but there are a lot of issues (which were addressed in the past). Take for example the sentence "Ea ia ia". It's pronounced /ja ja ia/. Some examples: * x exists and it's not clear if it's pronounced /ks/ or /gz/. * e is sometimes pronounced /je/ * h is pronounced as /x/ sometimes and Romanians don't realize this. E.g. hrană is [ˈxra.nə] even though people think t…

> h is pronounced as /x/ sometimes and Romanians don't realize this. Does the language actually have any minimal pairs where [h] vs [x] makes a difference? Most languages that have a velar fricative have a single phoneme that is either /x/ with [h] as an allophone in some contexts, or /h/ with [x] as an allophone in some contexts. There's no reason to reflect this in spelling if the distinction doesn't actually matte…

> unlike say Russian where you need to distinguish between "лёд" and "льёт" somehow.

But they are very different, no?) I'd think mistaking "лёд" for "йод" is easier.

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

#478

Post by aguaviva »

konart wrote: post #477
int_19h wrote: post #414

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> h is pronounced as /x/ sometimes and Romanians don't realize this. Does the language actually have any minimal pairs where [h] vs [x] makes a difference? Most languages that have a velar fricative have a single phoneme that is either /x/ with [h] as an allophone in some contexts, or /h/ with [x] as an allophone in some contexts. There's no reason to reflect this in spelling if the distinction doesn't actually matte…

> unlike say Russian where you need to distinguish between "лёд" and "льёт" somehow. But they are very different, no?) I'd think mistaking "лёд" for "йод" is easier.

Not as much as you would think.

Russian has terminal de-voicing; so /d/ softens to a /t/, hence сад = /sat/. (Sort of; actually it's something in between, but the shift is noticable).

And /l/ palatizes (becomes /lj/) before both е and ё, as in самолёт. (Actually the /j/ is built into ё of course, but somehow it seems helpful to recognize the commonality of the sounds when realized after /l/ - basically е becomes more yoff-like).

The vowel might differ (one may be more fronted or rounded than the other), but that tends to vary among speakers anyway.

Russian has a whole suite of secondary rules like this. Ukrainian by contrast is much more phonetic. But unlike English, at least Russian has a system.

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

#479

Post by hcs »

underlipton wrote: post #203
mattlondon wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But Waters Edge is totally fine if they mean "by the edge of the waters" and not "the edge belongs to the water". But hey, there are no rules or logic in English so have at it!

Yeah, that could totally be by design. For example,the book "Rainbows End" is not "Rainbow's End" specifically because the meaning of the first is intended, not the second.

Though when it comes up in the book it's clear that it was a mistake (or a cruel joke) in that context.

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

#480

Post by shiroiushi »

onlypassingthru wrote: post #159
ktosobcy wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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... )

The beauty of English is that it is controlled by the speakers and not by some pompous authority. It's even flexible enough to allow for regional differences, which allows my fellow Americans and I to spell words correctly like color and theater .

>It's even flexible enough to allow for regional differences, which allows my fellow Americans and I to spell words correctly like color and theater.

As I recall, the American spelling of color and other words like that was actually dictated by a "pompous authority", namely Noah Webster, who wrote the dictionary bearing his name. He wanted to simplify some spellings he saw as overly complicated. I happen to agree with him, but this wasn't because of regular, everyday people in different regions.

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