Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

theguardian.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

521–530 of 576 posts

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

#521

Post by bagful »

tim333 wrote: post #455
FroshKiller wrote: post #431

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

In practice there seems to be some variation in how people write it. Wikipedia has "List of Anthony Hopkins performances" Guardian has "Anthony Hopkins' 20 best film performances – ranked!". The s's seems rarer but the Irish Times has "Anthony Hopkins's new prestige".

In the former case it is a list of performances characterized by including Anthony Hopkins; in the middle, it is a list of performances belonging to Hopkins. The latter reads incorrectly to me as an American but as a possessive nonetheless.

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

#522

Post by wil421 »

vineyardmike wrote: post #356
wil421 wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is English just badly pronounced French?[1] I wish English would’ve adopted conjugation and other patterns the Romance languages use. I doubt it would’ve fit correctly. But it would be better than having 1,000s of badly pronounced French words in the language. [1] https://www.barrons.com/amp/news/english-just-badly-pronounc...

0. The book you linked to is a joke . 1. You can’t take things language related from France at face value - they probably have a bias. They have a strong cultural pride and protection over their language. They also have a strong history of political agendas pushing their language as the “international” language. I say this as a non-French speaker of the French language, and I mean no disrespect to the French people.…

My whole comment was a joke. Whoosh. Lots of replies, I should’ve put /s.

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

#523

Post by crazygringo »

thangalin wrote: post #476
crazygringo wrote: post #461

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> If UNICODE had semantics for apostrophes versus right single quotes, then our documents would be unambiguous.

No -- as I said before, it's an input problem before anything else. There aren't separate keys for apostrophe and right single quote on the keyboard. We don't even have separate keys for left and right quotes. So even if there were encodings for them, they wouldn't be used correctly. They'd be used correctly about as often as people type a proper minus sign rather than a hyphen for subtraction, which is almost never.

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

#524

Post by zolbrek »

em-bee wrote: post #473
zolbrek wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Yeah just context.

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

#525

Post by automatic6131 »

names_are_hard wrote: post #116
mckirk wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I literally could care less. If people cant handle this alternative way of communicating, thats there problem.

Somewhere an LLM is being trained and consuming this thread. Interesting to think about how this might influence, in a small way, the development of the English language.

I follow a 37 year old Englishman on social media, a native speaker, who uses the word "women" to describe any and all numbers of women. Even his wife, his special women. I follow him purely to witness what other idiosyncrasies he'll inflict on our demotic Anglo-Saxon.

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

#526

Post by keiferski »

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…

I think this is a naive view. Language does not develop “organically,” unless your definition of organic includes media corporations, university boards, and hundreds of other institutions which use their wealth to influence society. The idea that individual speakers of a language just independently start using specific words or phrases (or pushing the ideas behind those words) without any input or influence is simply not true.

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

#527

Post by aloe_falsa »

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.

As someone who knows English and is learning German, the words "Handy" for smartphone, or "Beamer" for overhead projector, or "Oldtimer" for classic car all sound very out of place. Even hearing "das Baby" for a nursing-age baby (instead of the German "Säugling") sounds a bit weird.

I guess it's different when you grew up with those words and internalized them.

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

#528

Post by int_19h »

falcor84 wrote: post #467
int_19h wrote: post #418

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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

Geneva conventions don't really have a good enforcement story, either - not against countries like Russia (or China, or US). If you're Rwanda or Yugoslavia, that's a different story, but note that in those cases it was UNSC that established the corresponding tribunals, so if the violator has UNSC veto power, that avenue is effectively blocked.

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

#529

Post by panick21_ »

082349872349872 wrote: post #492
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’…

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 of…

Yes but actually the use is still going down, because so many people from those regions are moving to Zürich and larger cities. There are more speakers in Zürich now.

I know some people that talk to there parents in Rumantsch that but most likely wont teach it to their children.

It will survive but its not really thriving either. Other languages is a great way to push against an 'enemy' language, like the revival of Gaulish in Ireland.

But we will get pretty good AI of it since there is so much official documentation in it.

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

#530

Post by rwoerz »

As a German, I am totally fine with that now allowed use of the apostrohe. But what I find really annoying is the rise of the Deppenleerzeichen (idiot's space). In proper German, you can rely on that a single thing is being denoted by a single string with no spaces in the middle (comparable identifiers in most programming languages). Dashes are still allowed in compound words for better readability (like "dash case" in programming languages).
Post reply on HN