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

#491

Post by dagw » Thu, Oct 10, 2024, 8:34 AM 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

The core model seems to have a lot learned behaviour that it applies to all (latin) languages. One is that people sometimes fail to hit space between words and when that happens, in most cases, people actually wanted to insert a space between the two distinct words, and this behaviour has carried over to other languages.

Also In Swedish splitting the words is many cases not incorrect, but just changes the meaning.

For example is Swedish an "English teacher" (Engelsk lärare) would be a teacher that is from England, while an "Englishteacher" is a teacher the teaches the subject English.

So "He is an English teacher" and "He is an Englishteacher" would both be valid sentences in Swedish, but the predictive text model seems to assume you wanted the first one.

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

#492

Post by 082349872349872 » Thu, Oct 10, 2024, 8:39 AM UTC

nicbou wrote: post #318

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…

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’…

Pt'être que demain ca ira mieux :) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TncdhLGjFTE

The story I heard about how Rumantsch (~40k L1) became the 4th language of switzerland is that one day toward the middle of last century, after Mussolini said that rumantsch speakers were just a bunch of farmers who didn't know how to speak proper italian, the swiss people essentially said « Esti d'épais à marde ! » by voting to make it official.

Lagniappe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BjoCmyhTSBU

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

#493

Post by lsaferite » Thu, Oct 10, 2024, 8:39 AM UTC

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…

Seeing "Hopkins's" is very weird to me. I was taught that the possessive of a noun ending in "s" just got a trailing apostrophe. Is that no longer the norm?

Edit: As a partially related aside, I have a friend who's right about the same age as me that's incredulous that I was taught to use "they" as a gender neutral pronoun when the subject's gender was unknown (or you desired not convey a gender) back in the late 80s and early 90s. Maybe it's just a regional difference in teaching or something. He's from the UP of Michigan, I'm from Florida. So maybe the same thing is true with possessive nouns

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

#494

Post by guenthert » Thu, Oct 10, 2024, 8:43 AM UTC

I probably have spent too much time in 'merica (yeah, that must be it, not that I would be such a Depp), but I don't see the problem.

"Even before the rule clarification, the German orthographic council permitted the use of the possessive apostrophe for the sake of clarity, such as “Andrea’s Bar” to make clear that the owner is called Andrea and not Andreas."

And what's wrong with more clarity?

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

#495

Post by JPLeRouzic » Thu, Oct 10, 2024, 9:01 AM UTC

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…

It seems to me that today's French is not exactly the French of 50 years ago. Orally it does not look so different but when the same people write, the difference is apparent.

All languages evolve through time, but I think that a major factor of evolution was the fact that it was accepted ~20 years ago that it's OK to write phonetically at school. And now we have school teachers that learned that way so it's definitely a standard feature of the current French.

For example the following hilarious reader comment in the economic news website "La Tribune":

"plutot que dire 18 milliares de deficte pour faire les gros titres il serais plus interessant de dire d'ou vient le soit disant deficite . La secu ne serait elle pas victime de paiement de prestations qui ne la concerne pas . qui s'en richie sur son dos ? N y aurit il pas des acteurs economiques qui ne participeraient pas a son financement et par contre lui demanderait des presttions ? c'est cela que lon veut savoir un peut comme les retriates ou le regime generale eponge les déficites qui ne le concerne pas par ce que letat ne finance pas les retaites de la fonction publique a son juste niveau."

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

#496

Post by mikae1 » Thu, Oct 10, 2024, 9:18 AM UTC

chromanoid wrote: post #408

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.

> Americentric Swedish Android keyboards are terrible offenders that happily splits words in two. This is how language evolves nowadays. :/

Or degrades, depending on how you see it. dagw explains how splitting or not splitting carries meaning[1]. I actually think it's a nice construct.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41796834

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

#497

Post by talideon » Thu, Oct 10, 2024, 9:26 AM UTC

fredgrott wrote: post #183

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…

fun fact its English that is the bastard here...same way Creole was formed as language...i.e. borrowed from elsewhere in this case Danes(Anglo) and Saxon part of Germany... and some minor contribution from the Normans of course...

No, English was not formed the same way as creoles are. A creole is a language that develops from a pidgin. That's a process of increasing complexity. English underwent _simplification_ due to significant contact with non-native speakers. That's the opposite process and gets referred to as "creolisation", which happens to languages all the time. Almost all the Romance languages underwent some degree of amount of it. Some pidgins and jargons might've developed along the way and influenced the change, but the key difference with creolisation is that the modern language didn't primarily develop out of these.

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

#498

Post by talideon » Thu, Oct 10, 2024, 9:33 AM UTC

cdumler wrote: post #172

Being an old, grey beard, it's been interesting to see language change in my lifetime. Things I learned: * Third-person singular indefinite ("he or she") can be replaced with third-person plural ("they"). Of course, a lot of changes around recognizing gender. * Final punctuation within the quote at the end of sentence (Did you just say "what?") can be placed after the final quote if the quote is for a literal string…

Your "plural singulars" have been the normal way of doing things in much of the Anglosphere outside of North America for quite some time.

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

#499

Post by dash2 » Thu, Oct 10, 2024, 9:40 AM UTC

chrisdhoover wrote: post #464

jhoechtl wrote: post #407

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

An English chap once asked a US friend of mine for a cigarette, or as he innocently put it, "Can I bum a fag?"

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

#500

Post by fennecfoxy » Thu, Oct 10, 2024, 9:47 AM UTC

The fact they called it the "idiot's apostrophe" makes me glad that it's being adopted in Germany. Jooooin us, join us Anglosphere idiots in our grammar rules!