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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

#531

Post by layer8 »

amadeuspagel wrote: post #484
BeretEnjoyer wrote: post #444

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Correct German orthography would require a hyphen for the interpretation as a compound noun.

Rosis-Bar = a bar serving (or otherwise related to) “Rosis”

Rosis Bar = Rosi’s bar

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

#532

Post by int_19h »

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.

In IPA notation, it's the difference between [ʎɵ] and [ʎjɵ], and contrasting the two is fairly rare in natural languages; East Slavic is somewhat unusual in that regard. If someone's language does not have this contrast, it sounds very similar to them, and distinguishing the two can be very difficult. Even in languages where such a distinction exists, there's a tendency towards a merger - Serbo-Croatian is one example of that, but the same is also happening in e.g. some dialects of Spanish with "ñ" [ɲ] vs "ny" [nj]. English speakers also have this problem with Spanish, by the way, hence why "cañon" became "canyon".

In general, what's perceived as "very different" or not is very subjective based on what one is used to. E.g. the distinction between "v" and "w" is very significant in English, but for speakers of many Slavic languages, those are allophones, and when they learn English they have trouble using them correctly.

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

#533

Post by bunderbunder »

foldr wrote: post #520
bunderbunder wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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”?

In general, yeah, but this is sneaking into the area of language where it's all ad-hoc conventions and there aren't actually any reliable rules. I suspect, for example, that there's a sandhi component that helps predict which store names do and do not get the S added.

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

#534

Post by int_19h »

aguaviva wrote: post #478
konart wrote: post #477

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

The interesting part here is /lj/ vs /lʲj/.

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

#535

Post by jasonpeacock »

cubefox wrote: post #515
jasonpeacock wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ;)

Yes, you're correct. I think I was trying to find a succinct way to say "everyone was happily using 'they' without concern until gendering became a hot topic and suddenly they noticed their usage of 'they' and didn't like that it was already an acceptable and in-use solution for including genderless people" or something like that :)

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

#536

Post by ktosobcy »

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 .

Yes... let's let all the users controll the language... and some may decide: https://www.davidpbrown.co.uk/jokes/european-commission.html ;)

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

#537

Post by int_19h »

Joker_vD wrote: post #481
int_19h wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 b…

Learned phonotactics matters, though, and many languages distinguish between what's allowed on word or morpheme boundaries vs what's allowed within a single syllable - so even if phonemically it's the same cluster, it can still be difficult to learn to pronounce it correctly in the second case.

There are quite a few languages where both vowel and consonant systems are simple - just look at Polynesian languages such as Māori. The latter's vowel system is 5-vowel, and "long vowels" are phonemically vowel sequences that span moras. But, yes, it does mean that you end up with long words such as "whakararurarutia". That said, it's a rather extreme case, and one can still construct fairly simple but rich consonant systems in practice, because it's basically combinatorics - adding just one more bit of information doubles the domain space! So e.g. if you start with a strict CV consonant system and allow C(l/r)V, that's almost 4x as many contrasting syllables. Make it C(l/r/w/y)V(C) like in Globasa, and even with considerable restrictions on clustering stops etc this is enough for most words to be 3 syllables or less, and for most function words to be 1 syllable.

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

#538

Post by 1-more »

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…

> Now, there are languages for which Globish can be part of an existential threat, but German and French are nowhere close to this.

While it may be accidental, maybe stemming the tide against Franglais will have a large secondary benefit for the minority language speakers of France. If your average native Gallo(e.g.) speaker needs to learn French in order to watch the news, that's one thing. If they then need to learn a bunch of English in order to speak French, well there's even less of a chance that they'll be able to spend a lot of their life speaking Gallo.

IDK maybe it will make no difference for those languages; French will crowd them out regardless of how much English there is in French.

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

#539

Post by ktosobcy »

r00fus wrote: post #234
onlypassingthru wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 .

You do realize that what people actually speak (in France) differs quite a bit from the Académie Française. email vs. courriel for example is a good one, but you'll stand out in most places if you don't know l'argot (slang). I don't think an English standardization would change much in how people actually speak.

Well, loanwords is slightly different that completely inconsistent spelling - wouldn't you say?

Imagine some would stick with original "bonjour" (Qubec), other more progressive would simplify to "bojur" and whatnote.

You have the same with "colour" and "color". Or "night" and "nite". From my observatio where you have some language authority there is at least consisten spelling (and english spelling is all over the place)

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

#540

Post by ktosobcy »

catlikesshrimp wrote: post #275
michaelt wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So it's definitely not impossible. Well, it's definitely not impossible to publish a document declaring itself the standard form of english. But I'm pretty sure it would be impossible to get english speakers to comply - or even to get any countries to make the standard legally binding.

Imagine either England or the USA accepting to vary their language towards a common standard. I expect strong opposition would stem from pride.

Judging from how well adopting SI went (is going in the UK?) sadly it seems impossible :(
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