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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

#481

Post by Joker_vD »

int_19h wrote: post #338
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…

Esperanto is still frustratingly complex with regard to phonemes for an international language. I think most speakers of many European languages don't realize just how complex their phonologies are on average. Slavic languages probably take the cake there with stuff like 5-consonant clusters that can even include sequences of plosives and affricates, but then you also have Germanic languages (and French!) with their…

The problem of consonant clusters is a bit overstated IMO. I once saw some English speaker complaining about how difficult it is to pronounce Russian, like take a phrase "на встрече" — there are 4 consonants at the start of that second word, wtf! — even though that cluster is exactly the same as the one in the English phrase "of strength"; this cluster even undergoes essentially the same simplification/reduction in both languages.

But I agree that overly large phonemic inventory is a problem. On the other hand, it seems that languages either have a complex consonant system but a simple vowel system; or a simple consonant system but a complex vowel system; I haven't yet seen a language where both systems are simple (Japanese vowels have tonality, so it's not a simple system IMHO), probably because the words in such a language would have to be quite long.

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

#482

Post by dirkt »

abeppu wrote: post #110
maxnoe wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because, according to the new rule, it's only permitted in proper names "Eva's Blumenladen" is the proper name of the shop, what is put on the sign above the door. "Evas Brille" is just Eva's glasses.

... but even before the rule change, in virtue of being a proper name, if the proprietor calls it "Eva's Blumenladen", and it's marked as such, wasn't it proper usage to refer to it that way? If I call my English business, "Joes Cafe" (intentionally not using an apostrophe), wouldn't it be incorrect for people to refer to it in writing as "Joe's Cafe"?

Define "proper usage". You can call it anything you want, but if you call it "Evas Blummenladen", people will wonder why you spelled "Blumen" wrong. Now sometimes people do that in names as a play on words etc., but here it just doesn't make sense.

In the same way, people will wonder why you spelled "Eva's" in "Eva's Blumenladen" wrong, if you spell it that way.

Yes, if enough people start doing a wrong thing, it'll eventually become "right", and I guess in 100 year's we can put apostrophy's where'ever we wa'nt, but currently it still looks odd, and like something that is foreign to German, and imported from English. Because unlike in English, in German this apostrophy doesn't stand for an omitted letter in the genitive singular ending.

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

#483

Post by shiroiushi »

meyum33 wrote: post #213
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... )

It won’t work. Just look at the mess of Imperial units in the United States. And this is when the metric system is vastly more straightforward, simply better, and universally adopted. The English language? No way any standardization would work. And that unlike the Imperial system the variations in English is probably a feature, not a bug.

>Just look at the mess of Imperial units in the United States.

The US doesn't use Imperial units; it uses "US Customary" units. They're not the same, though there is some overlap. Imperial units are used in the UK, which is why they're called "imperial" (from "empire"--the British Empire). Imperial inches, for instance, are the same as US inches (2.54cm), but UK/Imperial gallons are quite different from US gallons, which is why the miles-per-gallon ratings for cars are so different between the two countries.

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

#484

Post by amadeuspagel »

BeretEnjoyer wrote: post #444
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.

Compare:

- Sport Bar

- Lounge Bar

- Cafe Bar

(All from real german bar names.)

- Rosis Bar

Rosis could just as well be a word like Sport, Lounge or Cafe.

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

#485

Post by shiroiushi »

hosh wrote: post #313
tivert wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Pinyin is pretty good at rendering Manderin in a Latin script. It's pretty good for Mandarin speakers . It's terrible for English speakers. > Can you elaborate on what you mean by “English-friendly”? English friendly is something that will produce reasonably-close approximate pronunciations by an English reader without any extra foreign-language training. Basically, something that prioritizes following existing Eng…

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.

>Wades-Giles is closer to English-friendly, but it has a lot of flaws. It has no notion of intonations.

How could it? English is not a tonal language at all, so how could you possibly represent tonality with Latin characters, in a way that English speakers with no extra training could read such text and pronounce the Chinese word in an acceptable way? I don't think it's possible. It's just like trying to use Japanese characters to represent English names: a LOT is lost in translation, because there's simply no way to represent all English sounds in Japanese, since Japanese has far fewer possible sounds than English.

>It could go the other way if Mandarin is the dominant trade language.

But it's not, English is, like it or not. If you want to communicate with someone in any random country in the world, you have a very good chance of doing so if you speak English, regardless of your or the listener's native language. The same isn't true for Mandarin.

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

#486

Post by BlindEyeHalo »

wolframhempel wrote: post #220

I feel that most people instinctively assume that some institution, e.g. the government or the dictionary publishers are the authority on what constitutes "correct language". It's important to emphasize that language (included spelling) is something that develops organically and that the role of these institutions is just to capture the status quo. At least that should be the case in free societies. Language is power…

If you want to maintain mutual intelligibility of a nation you need a standardised set of rules to teach kids at school.

If you just let it "develop organically" without any governing body you get a wide range of dialects that will drift further apart from another and it will be very difficult to read any text that is 50 years old.

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

#487

Post by guenthert »

chromanoid wrote: post #392
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…

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…

> It doesn't look exotic, but English which is usually considered to be something modern.

It might have looked 'modern' (or rather progressive) seventy years ago (or thirty years ago in the east); these days using proper German seems rather backward, dated or borderline fascist.

It got pretty absurd over the last decades though. My parents were complaining about the bill they got from Telekom -- why in the world were 'Ferngespräche' listed there as 'long distance calls' in a text otherwise (near) German?

Now, I would love to see more English being used in Germany, particularly in official communication as there are plenty of people here who's first language isn't German. But why not both? It's not that much more work. Denglish however belongs strictly banned into the realm of comedy (recently I've seen a gas station advertizing its "Power Sauger" :))

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

#488

Post by bagels »

lxgr wrote: post #41
bagels wrote: post #25

The signs are in English, why does it matter how they would be written in German?

How so? "Harald's Eck" (one of the examples from the article) doesn't sound very English to me.

The first two given are "Rossi's Bar" and "Kati's Kiosk" which are perfectly reasonable English names for places, but it turns out that Bar and Kiosk are also perfectly fine words in German too. How about that.

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

#489

Post by psychoslave »

int_19h wrote: post #338
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…

Esperanto is still frustratingly complex with regard to phonemes for an international language. I think most speakers of many European languages don't realize just how complex their phonologies are on average. Slavic languages probably take the cake there with stuff like 5-consonant clusters that can even include sequences of plosives and affricates, but then you also have Germanic languages (and French!) with their…

Yes sure, there are a lot of things were Esperanto is not an ideal of linguistic easy-to-learn and easy-to-use fully-neutral perfection communication mean.

Now, the real success of Esperanto is that it does have an over 1 century international active community that does produce it’s own cultural artifacts, using Esperanto as a communication mean. All that without a bound army to back it at any point, that’s probably an unique feat in human history. Also to make it clear, it was not meant to be a universal language, but an international one.

Personally, I love that projects like Globasa comes to live. On a pragmatic level, large scale adoption is unlikely, but that is the case of any human endeavor. Let’s make sure that grandiloquence result likeliness never inhibit beautiful dreams being pursued.

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

#490

Post by psychoslave »

burningChrome wrote: post #365
nicbou wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Coming from Quebec, I understand why people are worried about their language being strangled out and their culture dying with it. For Quebec this has always been a threat. I live in Germany now. There are 10-15 times more German speakers in the DACH area than there are French speakers in Quebec. Even then, it’s weird that companies no longer bother translating their ads and slogans for the German-speaking market. It’…

>> Coming from Quebec, I understand why people are worried about their language being strangled out and their culture dying with it. One of the most fascinating things I learned about language in college when I was working towards my degree in Anthropology, a graduate student who was my class did their Master's on the linguistic differences between European French and the French Canadian (specifically the Quebec vers…

ok, great teaser, were is the mémoire? :)
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