It's not like English is much better on its own; We have the "Progressive Apostrophe", which is intended to warn the reader than the letter S is about to appear ("not responsible for accident's", "employee's must wash hand's", etc)
Germans decry influence of English as 'idiot's apostrophe' gets approval
511–520 of 576 posts
Re: Germans decry influence of English as 'idiot's apostrophe' gets approval
#512Fun fact: There seemed to have been a similar debate in the US at one point, but for entirely different reasons.
The US still has some places that contain possessive forms in their names, such as Martha's Vineyard. That seems to have caused some controversy during a standardization effort of place names in the 19th century. The apostrophe was dropped and the official name became "Marthas Vineyard". At some point, it was changed back, I assume because it looked too awkward and ungrammatical.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apostrophe#Possessives_in_geog...
(As a non-American, the more curious thing for me is that there are still place names that sound as if some 17th century explorer just sailed by and casually gifted the place to his wife. I'd now also like to know who John E. was.)
Re: Germans decry influence of English as 'idiot's apostrophe' gets approval
#513The 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…
Words "creeping into English" is like what the entire language is all about. If you take away the words brought in by immigrants and invaders there is very little recognizable left. >I'm not exactly worrying about "Haus" creeping into English to replace "House" It's literally already the same word, we just spell it "wrong", likely out of French/Norman influence.
> If you take away the words brought in by immigrants and invaders there is very little recognizable left.
This is not true at all. Most of the core vocabulary is derived from Old English. We’ve borrowed a ton of vocabulary to expand new concepts, but the core has remained relatively stable.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_English_words_of_Old...
Re: Germans decry influence of English as 'idiot's apostrophe' gets approval
#514Earlier quoted context omitted.
> calling it Uno's isn't inconsistent with how we talk about Walmart's stores calling it Uno's isn't inconsistent with how we talk about Walmart's stores or Google's website No, calling it "Uno Corp's pizzeria" would be the equivalent. Nobody says they're "Going down to Walmart's" or "doing some research on Google's."
My grandmother would indeed refer to shopping at “WalMart’s” or “Penney’s”. Maybe a regional thing (she was from central PA)?
The stores really were called Penneys (no idiot apostrophe present) until being gradually rebranded in the 70s and 80s.
some examples:
80s: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Downtown_Seattle_Pen...
70s: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:FW_Woolworth,_Penney...
60s: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Penneys,_Eastland_Ma...
50s: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:StateLibQld_1_46896_...
40s: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Seattle_-_Second_Ave...
Re: Germans decry influence of English as 'idiot's apostrophe' gets approval
#515Being 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…
Singular "they" has been around for a very long time, and used naturally without anyone noticing it as unusual, until recently when there's been more gender discussion and people suddenly realizing they were already recognizing genderless people without knowing it ;) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singular_they
> and people suddenly realizing they were already recognizing genderless people without knowing it ;)
They weren't recognizing genderless people just because they used "they" when the gender was unknown ;)
Re: Germans decry influence of English as 'idiot's apostrophe' gets approval
#516Being 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…
> * Companies switched from being singular plurals ("Google is deprecating another product.") to plural singulars ("Google are deprecating another product.")
I think that's just a grammatical error that people (sometimes) make, and it isn't even specific to English.
Re: Germans decry influence of English as 'idiot's apostrophe' gets approval
#517Fun fact: There seemed to have been a similar debate in the US at one point, but for entirely different reasons. The US still has some places that contain possessive forms in their names, such as Martha's Vineyard. That seems to have caused some controversy during a standardization effort of place names in the 19th century. The apostrophe was dropped and the official name became "Marthas Vineyard". At some point, it…
This was in the news in the UK recently:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-york-north-yorkshire-6....
Re: Germans decry influence of English as 'idiot's apostrophe' gets approval
#518The 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…
There was a funny guide circulating a few years ago about "Euro-English" used in the European Union and it's institutions, that was completely incomprehensible to a native speaker.
Re: Germans decry influence of English as 'idiot's apostrophe' gets approval
#519Earlier 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
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. Fo…
“He is an English Englishteacher” gives me a chuckle.
Re: Germans decry influence of English as 'idiot's apostrophe' gets approval
#520Earlier 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…
Is this not restricted to company names deriving from personal names (or words that are perceived as such), though? For example, would you say “I bought this shirt at Target’s”?