[HN Gopher] Germans decry influence of English as 'idiot's apost...
___________________________________________________________________
Germans decry influence of English as 'idiot's apostrophe' gets
approval
Author : pseudolus
Score : 181 points
Date : 2024-10-09 13:16 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.theguardian.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.theguardian.com)
| theandrewbailey wrote:
| > The Deppenapostroph is not to be confused with the English
| greengrocer's apostrophe, when an apostrophe before an 's' is
| mistakenly used to form the plural of a noun ("a kilo of
| potato's").
|
| Grocer's apostrophes annoy me, along with words like "advices"
| (advice is an abstract noun and can't be plural, like
| "happiness") and "learnings" (use "lessons" instead).
| causi wrote:
| It's bizarre. I hate seeing it as well but if I don't pay
| attention I find myself typing them for no discernable reason.
| raverbashing wrote:
| There is no more misguided use of an apostrophe than to use it
| to "create a pronoun's possessive" as using "it's" in place of
| "its"
|
| Do you also write "he's" and "she's" (as possessive pronouns)?
| No? Then it's "its".
| robertlagrant wrote:
| Er, yes because they're short for he is and she is. You mean
| "his" and "hers".
| raverbashing wrote:
| But you don't write them like that, you write "his/hers"
| oneeyedpigeon wrote:
| Different words. "His dog" means the dog belonging to
| him. "He's a dog" means "he is a dog".
| raverbashing wrote:
| > Different words
|
| Obviously
|
| I meant people don't write "he's" as the possessive form
| of he. Hence they shouldn't write it's as the possessive
| form of it.
| mouse_ wrote:
| he's/she's going to have to deal with it
| nozzlegear wrote:
| Or even "it's going to have to deal with it" -- though
| hopefully the pronoun refers to a pet or farm animal of
| some kind, as referring to a human as "it" is dehumanizing.
| ben_w wrote:
| "He's got a head shaped like a massive orange"
|
| "Who?"
|
| "Xtk'act'sbu"
|
| "Oh no, not the Klingon cosplayer!"
| itronitron wrote:
| So is this the proper form?
|
| -> it's putting the lotion on its skin
| vundercind wrote:
| Corporate English is a blight. So many ugly substitutions,
| overloading existing words, for perfectly good _and common_
| words we already have.
| mwigdahl wrote:
| It is my belief that you may not fully leverage the
| synergistic potential of the value-added verbosity inherent
| in corporate linguistics.
| daveslash wrote:
| Agreed. It's very important to maximize cross-functional
| coherence to capitalize on strategic imperatives for
| maximal growth opportunities.
| sokoloff wrote:
| Unless there's a fulcrum involved, I don't want to read the
| word "leverage".
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| The fulcrum is externalities. Good ask, though!
| lxgr wrote:
| Let's double-click on that: There's value in expensive
| signalling, and sometimes the expense is an intentional (or
| at least tolerated) lack of aesthetics.
| vundercind wrote:
| We should take this offline so we can really zoom in.
| Muromec wrote:
| Corporate life is just really boring and this kind of
| nonsense is understood as _fun_ by people engaging in it.
| okeuro49 wrote:
| "informations" is a good one for non-native English language
| speakers to look out for.
| pjot wrote:
| As is "codes" - I hear this often from non-native colleagues
| Spivak wrote:
| This one is honestly confusing.
|
| * Error codes -- correct.
|
| * Their personal codes -- correct.
|
| * Multiple codes of conduct -- correct.
|
| And then computer code is used roughly like the noun
| 'writing' except you can say writings where appropriate.
| pjot wrote:
| The difference lies in how we conceptualize the noun:
|
| - Computer code is seen as a continuous substance or body
| of work, like "writing" or "music."
|
| - Other types of codes are seen as discrete units or
| systems.
|
| It's similar to how we say "information" (uncountable)
| but "facts" (countable), even though they're related
| concepts.
| jameshart wrote:
| Yes, code is a substance, like sand or iron. The system
| is built out of code (not codes), just like the table is
| built out of wood (not woods).
|
| Hearing someone talk about 'codes' has the same weird
| vibe as when they talk about 'Legos'.
| Ekaros wrote:
| Source codes of dependencies. Might be acceptable...
|
| Also why not pluralise all words? Sources codes.
| ben_w wrote:
| With regard to source code(s), I hear it exclusively from
| scientists, regardless of nationality.
|
| None of the coders I've worked with (and I'm in Berlin)
| have put the s on the end of code.
|
| Quite a few will use "he" to describe inanimate objects,
| though: "I spilled coffee on the table and now he is wet",
| that kind of thing.
|
| (This is still better than my German, which is embarassing
| given how long I've been here)
| bee_rider wrote:
| I think it makes sense, like a scientist might think of
| their codes as discrete things, because one code was
| written for each experiment. The work-product is the
| experiment, the codes are just little things that make it
| happen.
| marssaxman wrote:
| In scientific computing, they tend to say "code" where
| the rest of us would say "program".
| generic92034 wrote:
| Programs? I rarely hear it these days. It's all "apps".
| ;)
| samatman wrote:
| Hearing "codes" generally means you've found yourself
| around Fortran. Simple as.
| nanna wrote:
| Nonsense. Informations has long been used in English. I have
| before me a letter by Albert Einstein to Norbert Wiener
| regarding a young Kurt Eisemann, in which Einstein writes,
| "From his letter enclosed here, you will get informations
| about his life and studies before he arrived here." And in
| the Princeton translation of Aristotle's Constitution of
| Athens one finds, "The Eleven also bring up informations laid
| against magistrates alleged to be disqualified". Informations
| is perhaps a bit obscure but it's perfectly valid.
| psychoslave wrote:
| Well, for what I red, Einstein primary language stayed
| German all life through (Information/Informationen). And he
| learned English rather late in life, starting at 34
| apparently.[1] And while not speaking German, he was more
| likely to practice some Italian as a spontaneous expression
| desire (informazione/informazioni) and did practice French
| well enough to give a lecture in this latter language
| (information/informations).
|
| [1] https://www.lingalot.com/what-languages-did-albert-
| einstein-...
| psychoslave wrote:
| But did you know that there huge load of "datas" out there?
| jjk166 wrote:
| That one's a bit mean given that data does have a distinct
| plural, it just happens to be spelled the same because
| whoever came up with english didn't really grok the
| phonetic alphabet.
| nobody9999 wrote:
| >That one's a bit mean given that data does have a
| distinct plural, it just happens to be spelled the same
| because whoever came up with english didn't really grok
| the phonetic alphabet.
|
| Isn't 'data' already plural, with 'datum' being the
| singular of the plural 'data'?
| inkcapmushroom wrote:
| Datum is the singular, which is one point of data. When
| you group together a datum with another datum, they
| become data.
| jamincan wrote:
| And the origin of that plural form comes from Latin.
| jjk166 wrote:
| Data can be used as a plural or as a mass noun. When it
| is a mass noun it is treated as singular. Hence we say
| "data _is_ hard to come by " versus "data _are_ hard to
| come by. "
|
| Also datums is the plural of datum when it is used in an
| engineering sense, which is the most likely place one
| would still encounter it.
| zztop44 wrote:
| "Learnings" has a potentially useful nuance, referring
| specifically to whatever it is one took away from a lesson. I
| know the word "lesson" itself can also cover that meaning, but
| "learning" is more specific and given how widely it's used,
| that specificity appears to be useful in some circumstances.
| ivan_gammel wrote:
| Those plural forms are sometimes referred to as European
| continental dialect of English and do not raise questions here.
| If we, Europeans have to use English as lingua franca, we can
| and we will adapt it to our needs same way as Americans, Afro-
| Americans or Indians did. So my advice: just get used to it.
|
| Edit: cultural possession of language is nonsense, it belongs
| to all speakers, native and non-native alike. Germans must get
| used to foreign influence on their language too and Ukrainians
| should stop fighting Russian language and start writing their
| own rules for it (what can piss Moscow more?)
| Semaphor wrote:
| I had never heard of that, but Wikipedia has similar examples
| in "Euro English" [0], though there it is because similar
| words exist with s in other languages. I wonder if something
| like "advices" exists in another language?
|
| [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euro_English#Inflection
| hydrolox wrote:
| I think you can say it does? Ie in other languages, the
| plural of advice (which in English is advice, "I gave him a
| lot of advice") is spelled differently(with the plural
| ending). From my personal knowledge, in Russian advice is
| sovet and "advices" (or advice pl.) is sovet _y_. In
| Spanish, advice is consejo and there is a plural consejos.
| This can probably be also translated (in both cases) as
| "tip" and"tips" or something similar.
| Semaphor wrote:
| Yeah, but at least the examples wikipedia has, are for
| similar words, not just applying random other grammatical
| rules:
|
| informations (French) -> informations (English)
|
| competences -> competences
| t0mas88 wrote:
| The Dutch may have some "rights" to adapt English. They're #1
| in non-native English proficiency for 5 years in a row and
| surpassed Canada (considered native speakers) on overall
| English proficiency some years ago.
|
| One point of debate is that English in the Netherlands has
| become mostly American English over the last decades due to
| media influence. While originally "school English" in the
| Netherlands was British English.
| Spivak wrote:
| I actually go full-descriptivist on this and it erases all
| the posturing. If you're a speaker of English, native or
| otherwise, and you say or write something purposefully and
| don't consider it a mistake then it's correct.
|
| Wether other people will join you in your new usage is yet
| undetermined but also doesn't really matter. AAVE is the
| perfect example of this happening large scale in the real
| world.
| oneeyedpigeon wrote:
| "Wether"--I see what you did there...
| vundercind wrote:
| There are multiple ways to define "correct". I tend to
| favor: having the desired effect. This results in a
| "correct" that is highly flexible, but doesn't label
| anything that one happens to choose as "correct".
| umanwizard wrote:
| > Canada (considered native speakers)
|
| A quarter of the population of Canada is in Quebec where
| the only official language is French and most people would
| not be considered native English speakers.
| njtransit wrote:
| Learning can be the gerund form of the verb "to learn" and
| isn't necessarily a noun referring to the abstract concept.
| praptak wrote:
| "Learnings" is more than annoying corpspeak though. It's a word
| so old that you can find usage from time it was spelled
| "lernynges" ("lernynges whiche Cathon gaf to his sone")
|
| https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/118379/first-use...
| drewcoo wrote:
| I would normally expect "the grocer's apostrophe" to refer to a
| single grocer and "the grocers' apostrophe" to refer to a
| plural group of grocers, which I assume is what you intended.
| oneeyedpigeon wrote:
| The term "(green)grocer's apostrophe" refers to the misuse of
| the apostrophe in plurals, which seemingly occurs
| disproportionately on signs in those shops. It's ironic that
| it contains a tricky-to-place apostrophe. Should the meaning
| be "the apostrophe of the greengrocer" or should it be "the
| apostrophe that greengrocers misuse"? Either works fine. For
| the same reason, I always have to check whether it's
| "mother's day" or "mothers' day" because... it's both!
| oneeyedpigeon wrote:
| Similar--and even more on-topic--I see a lot of non-first-
| language writers using "codes" in a similar way, to describe
| source code snippets.
| bee_rider wrote:
| I've never heard "advices" (in the US). Maybe it is a
| continental Europe thing? They may have surpassed even us, at
| the art of inventing new words and spellings to annoy the
| English.
| cpwright wrote:
| I've heard my wife say it that way because it is a plural in
| her native language.
| helpfulContrib wrote:
| German is not that easy, either, though.
|
| Das/Der/Die is a constant source of frustration. Its never easy
| to remember.
| DrillShopper wrote:
| When in doubt use das like half the population of Berlin.
| jeffbee wrote:
| Can we get the other half to convert? Gendered articles are
| so annoying to remember, especially if you have to travel
| between German-speaking places that don't agree on all the
| noun genders. English speakers cannot be expected to
| understand this!
| chimeracoder wrote:
| > Can we get the other half to convert? Gendered articles
| are so annoying to remember, especially if you have to
| travel between German-speaking places that don't agree on
| all the noun genders. English speakers cannot be expected
| to understand this!
|
| That's what Dutch did. As spoken in most of the
| Netherlands, Dutch "eliminated" grammatical gender... which
| is to say it now has two grammatical genders: "both" ("de")
| and "neither" ("het").
| inglor_cz wrote:
| It is doubly so if your native language is also a gendered one,
| but with different genders for common objects. It makes a mess
| in your head.
|
| CZ: ten nuz (masc.) - DE: das Messer (neutr.) - EN: knife
|
| CZ: ten svet (masc.) - DE: die Welt (fem.) - EN: world
|
| CZ: ta zaba (fem.) - DE: der Frosch (masc.) - EN: frog
|
| Also, personified Death and rivers seem to be masculine-coded
| in Germanic languages, and feminine-coded in Slavic ones.
| Muromec wrote:
| To nobody's surprise nizh, svit, zhaba have exactly right
| genders so it's Germans who are confused.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| But, for some weird reason, modern Bulgarian mutated gender
| of "evening" to feminine:
|
| Tazi vecher
|
| even though in the greeting "good evening", the old
| masculine form remains:
|
| dob'r vecher
|
| Bulgarian in general seems to be the Chad of the Slavic
| language family :)
| int_19h wrote:
| It also doesn't help when words in a single language that can
| refer to the same thing have different grammatical genders
| (e.g. mesiats vs luna).
| inglor_cz wrote:
| For extra spiciness, try the same word in all three
| genders, with different meanings in each one:
|
| DE:
|
| der Band ... volume (as in "the second volume in a
| collection of books")
|
| die Band ... group (as in "the Beatles are a group")
|
| das Band ... ribbon
| OptionOfT wrote:
| Same in French. Le and la. (Masculine or feminine).
|
| In Dutch: De and het, where de is for masculine and feminine,
| and het for ... I don't even know. And I'm a native Dutch
| speaker.
|
| Edit: German also has cases: Nominative, accusative, dative and
| genitive, like Greek.
|
| Latin had a 5th one.
| Muromec wrote:
| How about up to seven cases and three genders in Slavic
| languages? That's the real struggle.
| ttyprintk wrote:
| If the cost of this is to look utterly stupid, who in Germany
| would sincerely coddle a small number of English-first
| obsessives? Is the story here that Germans feel better about
| taking a stand when they're told they have a choice?
| mkesper wrote:
| It's simply giving up resistance against a widespread usage.
| Adds more confusing rules though as "Eva's Brille" still is
| considered wrong (not a name itself).
| morsch wrote:
| Unless you're selling glasses under that name, then it's
| fine. Lol.
| mattmaroon wrote:
| In America an idiot's apostrophe is when someone uses it to
| pluralize words and it too seems to be growing in use.
| waterproof wrote:
| In the article they call that the "greengrocer's apostrophe" as
| in "twelve potato's".
| itronitron wrote:
| I don't know that I have ever seen that in the wild, but
| probably only because I refuse to accept that it exists.
| oneeyedpigeon wrote:
| I believe the term originated here in the UK, where it's
| actually pretty common. Although, ironically, greengrocers
| aren't so much anymore.
| automatic6131 wrote:
| If you could of seen some of the spelling mistakes I of,
| you would of run away screaming, and there's nothing else
| you should of done.
| mckirk wrote:
| I literally could care less. If people cant handle this
| alternative way of communicating, thats there problem.
| names_are_hard wrote:
| 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.
| pivo wrote:
| I saw it in a Home Depot in the US once. It was father's
| day and there was a sign that read, "Dad's Love Tools". Of
| course they meant to say, "Dads Love Tools".
|
| I thought it was particularly funny and embarrassing for
| the store, but I couldn't get the clerk at the store to
| understand what was wrong.
| kreyenborgi wrote:
| > but I couldn't get the clerk at the store to understand
| what was wrong.
|
| I would have loved to watch that conversation :-)
| ToucanLoucan wrote:
| > I couldn't get the clerk at the store to understand
| what was wrong.
|
| Not surprising. Tons of Americans are borderline
| illiterate. It's one of many things that makes it
| annoying to live here, especially as the amount of
| communication done in text increases with more advents in
| technology.
|
| I recall reading somewhere that the standard reading
| level for the states is about sixth grade, and if
| anything that comes across to me as slightly generous.
| Honestly this is one of my few hopes with the
| proliferation of LLM: that it will make reading
| communications from other workers less utterly painful.
| itronitron wrote:
| Even among the highly educated, it's shocking how
| resistant some of them are to written communication.
|
| I used to wonder if there was something wrong with my
| email, then I considered maybe they were likely busy,
| indifferent, or lazy, and now I wonder if they are just
| barely functionally literate so that drafting a response
| induces a significant mental burden.
| Wytwwww wrote:
| > proliferation of LLM: that it will make reading
| communications from other workers less utterly painful.
|
| By somehow magically inferring what the person was trying
| to say and padding it with pointless verbosity?
|
| I'm afraid we'll need to wait for Neuralink 20.0 to solve
| this problem...
| kyleee wrote:
| Dad's Love Tool strikes again
| nobody9999 wrote:
| >Dad's Love Tool strikes again
|
| That's what she said!
| onlypassingthru wrote:
| Dad's Love Tool is why he's a dad.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Clerk probably had nothing to do with it, could not
| change it, and didn't care anyway.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| potatoe's
| forinti wrote:
| I see this a lot in Brazil, and English is not even our
| language!
| phito wrote:
| French people do make this mistake a lot too.
| Tepix wrote:
| In dutch, it's not even a mistake for certain words ending with
| vowels.
|
| For example "Photo's".
| mattferderer wrote:
| Made me think of this old joke that's been on HackerNews, Reddit,
| etc for years:
|
| The European Commission has just announced an agreement whereby
| English will be the official language of the European Union
| rather than German, which was the other possibility.
|
| As part of the negotiations, the British Government conceded that
| English spelling had some room for improvement and has accepted a
| 5- year phase-in plan that would become known as "Euro-English".
|
| In the first year, "s" will replace the soft "c". Sertainly, this
| will make the sivil servants jump with joy. The hard "c" will be
| dropped in favour of "k". This should klear up konfusion, and
| keyboards kan have one less letter.
|
| There will be growing publik enthusiasm in the sekond year when
| the troublesome "ph" will be replaced with "f". This will make
| words like fotograf 20% shorter.
|
| In the 3rd year, publik akseptanse of the new spelling kan be
| expekted to reach the stage where more komplikated changes are
| possible.
|
| Governments will enkourage the removal of double letters which
| have always ben a deterent to akurate speling.
|
| Also, al wil agre that the horibl mes of the silent "e" in the
| languag is disgrasful and it should go away.
|
| By the 4th yer peopl wil be reseptiv to steps such as replasing
| "th" with "z" and "w" with "v".
|
| During ze fifz yer, ze unesesary "o" kan be dropd from vords
| kontaining "ou" and after ziz fifz yer, ve vil hav a reil sensi
| bl riten styl.
|
| Zer vil be no mor trubl or difikultis and evrivun vil find it ezi
| TU understand ech oza. Ze drem of a united urop vil finali kum
| tru.
|
| Und efter ze fifz yer, ve vil al be speking German like zey
| vunted in ze forst plas.
|
| ---
|
| source:
| https://www.reddit.com/r/Jokes/comments/leq19j/english_to_be...
| Semaphor wrote:
| As a German, I must say this is very well done. It went from
| clear English, over me having to think about every word, to
| clear English again (though only if I read it out loud)
| vundercind wrote:
| Reads like Mark Twain's short piece "A Plan for the Improvement
| of English Spelling"
|
| https://faculty.georgetown.edu/jod/texts/twain.html
|
| [edit] _Maybe_ Twain, anyway. The attribution is dubious, but
| common.
| nobody9999 wrote:
| >Reads like Mark Twain's short piece "A Plan for the
| Improvement of English Spelling"
|
| Which is a gem, regardless of authorship. Another related bit
| associated with Twain is:
|
| "whenever the literary german dives into a sentence, this is
| the last you are going to see of him till he emerges on the
| other side of his atlantic with his verb in his mouth."[0]
|
| Which, as a native English speaker who learned German, I find
| both amusing and (mostly) correct.
|
| [0] https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/115614-whenever-the-
| literar...
|
| Edit: Added source reference link.
| xxs wrote:
| Two beers fine for an old joke!
| _visgean wrote:
| I think the conclusion is wrong; that sounds much more like
| dutch.
| diggan wrote:
| I think that says a lot about the origin of the joke, which
| most likely comes from outside Europe :)
| int_19h wrote:
| Dutch is more or less what you get if you take German and
| English and meet in the middle.
| indigoabstract wrote:
| Nice one. This confirms my long held suspicion that German
| contains a lot of badly spelled Englisch words. Or maybe, it's
| the other way around?
| randomtoast wrote:
| 'If a lie is only printed often enough, it becomes a quasi-truth,
| and if such a truth is repeated often enough, it becomes an
| article of belief, a dogma, and men will die for it.' - The Crown
| of Life (1896)
| bagels wrote:
| The signs are in English, why does it matter how they would be
| written in German?
| lxgr wrote:
| How so? "Harald's Eck" (one of the examples from the article)
| doesn't sound very English to me.
| patrickmcnamara wrote:
| The signs are not in English.
| maxnoe wrote:
| How is Blumenladen English?
| alex_john_m wrote:
| I say the EU should adopt the Romanian language. It's spoken the
| same way as it is written.
|
| That should solve all spelling problems forever. :)))
| rafram wrote:
| No natural language is actually 100% phonetic. Romanian is no
| exception. Romanian spelling and pronunciation are _close_ to
| phonetic, but the same is true of German.
| badmintonbaseba wrote:
| Hungarian gets pretty close too, but yeah, there are
| exceptions.
| int_19h wrote:
| Among European languages, Serbo-Croatian is probably the
| closest to phonemic spelling. An interesting way to test
| this is to train a basic language model on a representative
| language, and then see how many mistakes it makes on words
| it doesn't know (https://aclanthology.org/2021.sigtyp-1.1/)
| - in this study, Serbo-Croatian scored over 99% for both
| reading and writing accuracy. Finnish and Turkish are also
| pretty good.
| Tainnor wrote:
| A writing system being _phonetic_ would be impractical,
| because most languages have tons of little phonetic
| alterations of individual sounds depending on position in the
| word /syllable, regional variation, etc.
|
| What you usually want is that the writing system be
| _phonemic_ , i.e. that there is a 1:1 correspondence between
| phonemes (meaningfully distinctive sound units) and
| characters. Unfortunately, languages evolve, so even if your
| writing systems starts out as more or less phonemic, over
| time the sounds of the language will drift and inertia will
| usually keep the writing system not fully in sync with these
| changes. This is particularly bad in the case of English,
| where there's never been a proper spelling reform accounting
| for the corresponding sound changes.
| OkayPhysicist wrote:
| English should just abandon differentiating vowels all
| together. All dialects of English shwa unemphasized vowels
| to some extent, and the different dialects largely boil
| down to how we pronounce various vowels.
|
| J`st ch`nge `m t` di`cr`t'c m`rks, `nd `t's st`ll p`rf`ctl`
| l`g`ble
| Muromec wrote:
| reject the alphabet and stop writing vowels unless really
| needed.
| xdennis wrote:
| It's not though. It's much more regular than english, but there
| are a lot of issues (which were addressed in the past).
|
| Take for example the sentence "Ea ia ia". It's pronounced /ja
| ja ia/.
|
| Some examples:
|
| * x exists and it's not clear if it's pronounced /ks/ or /gz/.
|
| * e is sometimes pronounced /je/
|
| * h is pronounced as /x/ sometimes and Romanians don't realize
| this. E.g. hrana is ['xra.n@] even though people think they say
| ['hra.n@]
|
| * i is the worst letter in Romanian. It has three
| pronunciations: /i/, /j/ and /j/. Take for example "copiii". Is
| it pronounced /kopiji/, /kopiii/, /kopjji/? Nope, it's
| /ko'pi.ij/ . In the past /j/ and /j/ were written with i making
| things a bit easier.
|
| * Stress is not written which causes confusions between words
| like "muie" /mu'je/ (softened) and "muie" /'muje/ (blowjob)
|
| * /i/is written as both i and a based on some stupid rule to
| preserve Romania being writen as Romania instead of Rominia.
| This is to remind foreigners that we were once Romans, but it's
| pointless because most foreigners think Romania means "land of
| Roma (gypsy) people".
|
| I've heard that Serbian in Cyrillic is very phonetic though.
| int_19h wrote:
| > 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 matter.
|
| > I've heard that Serbian in Cyrillic is very phonetic
| though.
|
| Serbo-Croatian in all its varieties is almost perfectly
| phonemic aside from pitch accent. Cyrillic vs Latin doesn't
| actually matter because even though Latin has more digraphs
| (lj for lj and nj for nj), they are unambiguous - there's no
| contrast between "lj" and "l" followed by "j", unlike say
| Russian where you need to distinguish between "liod" and
| "l'iot" somehow.
|
| If you want no digraphs at all, Serbian and Montenegrin
| Cyrillic is still not ideal because "dz" is a digraph.
| Macedonian fixes it by using the historical Cyrillic "dz"
| [d]zelo for /dz/ though, if you want a perfect 1:1 glyph to
| phoneme mapping.
|
| Cyrillic in general is surprisingly good as a "universal
| alphabet" if you also consider historical letters and not
| just the current ones. It has unambiguous glyphs for all
| labial, alveolar, retroflex, and velar plosives, affricates,
| and fricatives, a uniform way to represent
| plain/palatalized/velarized distinction for any consonant,
| and if you consistently use "'" for palatalization of
| consonants you can also repurpose the "soft" vowels to
| indicate fronting of vowels specifically.
| mglz wrote:
| People get upset about this while you encounter statements like
| "life your live" regularly, sometimes even on TV.
| RegnisGnaw wrote:
| What they need is learn from Canada and have a language police.
| Go around and fine business that don't follow the rules of German
| properly.
| forinti wrote:
| You can bet old German ladies already point out people's
| mistakes.
| RegnisGnaw wrote:
| Do they go around threatening fines and suspension of their
| business license?
| umanwizard wrote:
| Nothing like what you described exists in Canada.
|
| You are presumably referring to the OQLF (a provincial
| institution, not a "Canadian" one) which enforces French as the
| dominant public language in Quebec. Given that Quebec, despite
| being surrounded by the Anglosphere, hasn't ended up like
| Louisiana or Ireland where French or Irish as the primary
| native language is a distant memory, suggests that their
| efforts are successful.
| int_19h wrote:
| It is rather telling that Quebec had to repeatedly to use the
| "notwithstanding clause" of the Canadian Charter of Human
| Rights and Freedoms (which is basically a legal way for the
| province of saying "fuck you, we don't care about your pesky
| rights") to do that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_33
| _of_the_Canadian_Cha...
| umanwizard wrote:
| It's also worth pointing out that Quebec was conquered by
| military force, has never agreed to be bound by the
| Canadian constitution, and follows it under duress.
|
| Indeed they may be violating something that the Canadian
| constitution -- a document they never agreed to --
| describes as a "right". On the other hand, on the scale of
| human rights, the right of business owners to publicly
| display English-only signs is a rather weak one and
| reasonable people could debate whether it's fundamental and
| inalienable.
| int_19h wrote:
| The CHRF rights that they circumvented "notwithstanding"
| are pretty generic and commonly recognized human rights,
| not something that the Anglos invented specifically for
| Canada.
|
| And it was far more extensive than shop signs, but e.g.
| using genealogy to decide which children may or may not
| attend English-language schools. Although even wrt shop
| signs, you're still omitting important details - forcing
| shops to put French on signs is not unreasonable per se,
| but forcing them to make it larger than English even in
| cases where French is already perfectly visible and
| legible (i.e. beyond an obvious utilitarian purpose) is
| just petty revenge.
|
| I also have to remind that the French are themselves
| colonial settlers in Canada, and that the requirement
| that French must be the "predominant language" on signs
| also applies to bilingual French/Native signs outside of
| official reservations.
|
| In general, just because someone has been oppressed
| historically doesn't mean that they can't become
| oppressors themselves when they have the political power
| to do so. Quebec is not unique in that regard.
| umanwizard wrote:
| > The CHRF rights that they circumvented
| "notwithstanding" are pretty generic and commonly
| recognized human rights
|
| And yet, the examples you posted don't really sound like
| serious human rights violations to me. So perhaps they
| are being interpreted expansively by Canadian
| jurisprudence.
|
| > using genealogy to decide which children may or may not
| attend English-language schools.
|
| Lots of places only let you attend school in the official
| language. So by letting people who are part of the
| Anglophone community (i.e., born to Anglophone parents, I
| guess what you're calling genealogy) attend English-
| language schools they're making _more_ concessions to the
| Anglophone minority than is generally accepted as
| required by human rights. I certainly don't see anyone in
| the political mainstream claiming that France is
| committing human rights violations by refusing to set up
| public schools in languages other than French.
|
| > forcing them to make it larger than English even in
| cases where French is already perfectly visible and
| legible (i.e. beyond an obvious utilitarian purpose) is
| just petty revenge
|
| It is not petty revenge. Well, maybe it is for some
| hardcore nationalists. But the more charitable
| interpretation, that French needs a bit of an extra push
| (beyond just requiring equal exposure as English) in
| order to withstand the huge pressure from the surrounding
| Anglosphere, is reasonable.
|
| > I also have to remind that the French are themselves
| colonial settlers in Canada, and that the requirement
| that French must be the "predominant language" on signs
| also applies to bilingual French/Native signs outside of
| official reservations.
|
| I agree with you here. Indigenous people should be able
| to protect their culture from the dominant surrounding
| Franco-Quebec culture just like Franco-Quebecers should
| be allowed to protect their own from the dominant
| surrounding Anglosphere, and I unreservedly criticize the
| Quebec government as hypocrites for not allowing them to.
| int_19h wrote:
| I think it's disingenuous to describe actively forcing
| people to speak and write language other than their
| preferred one as "a bit of an extra push".
|
| Speaking more broadly, languages aren't persons and so
| they don't have rights; people do. Francophone Quebecois
| should have the right to live in a society in which
| knowledge of French alone doesn't put one at a
| significant immediate disadvantage, but I don't think
| there's a right to not be offended by use of other
| languages around them, or to force other people to switch
| their primary language.
|
| In the context of the sign law, regulations on _absolute_
| legibility of French text would be sufficient to achieve
| the former goal, while the actual law that Quebec has is
| about the latter - that is the whole point of the "extra
| push". If anything, I would say that _that_ is a good
| example of hardcore nationalism, actually, because it
| places the interests of the abstract generalized nation
| over the interests of concrete people who live there.
| dackle wrote:
| The language police are mentioned on page 65 of "Solomon
| Gursky Was Here" by Mordecai Richler, published 1989:
|
| The lot outside The Caboose, punctured with potholes,
| overlooked a lush meadow lined with cedars. There were picnic
| tables out there as well as an enormous barbecue, the engine
| a salvage job done on an abandoned four-stroke lawn mower.
| Sundays in summer the truculent and hungover Rabbit would
| turn up at seven A.M. to begin roasting a pig or a couple of
| shoulders of beef for the community dinner, all you could eat
| for five bucks, proceeds to The Old Folks Home in Rock
| Island. The Rabbit was once dismissed for pissing in the
| fire. "People was looking and it puts them off their feed."
| He was fired again for falling asleep in the grass after
| guzzling his umpteenth Molson and failing to notice that the
| spit hadn't been revolving properly for more than an hour.
| Then he beat up an inspector from the _Commission de la
| Langue Francaise_ outside The Thirsty Boot on the 243.
| According to reports the inspector had ordered The Thirsty
| Boot to take down their sign and replace it with a French
| one. "Sure thing," the Rabbit had said, kneeing the
| inspector in the groin, just to cut him down to his own
| height before laying into him. "We're gonna put up a pepper
| sign all right. Only it's gonna read 'De Tirsty Boot'." After
| that he could do no wrong.
| Muromec wrote:
| If language police is what I think it is, it doesn't fine for
| bad command of the language, but rather for using the wrong
| language after being asked nicely twice.
| psychoslave wrote:
| 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_languages
|
| There are also a measurable economical issues for non-English-
| native nations to have to use the de facto lingua-franca of the
| day that is English. Of course neither German nor French would be
| a better alternative as a global international neutral language.
|
| To my knowledge, the only proposal that gained some modest but
| significant results on that side over the last century is
| Esperanto. You know, the language against which France has put
| its veto has it was proposed as language of communication in
| League of Nations (1920s) or UNESCO (1954) and still is unhelpful
| with its adoption in United Nations.
|
| Fun fact, Germany has a city where street names and many other
| things are translated in Esperanto:
| https://uea.facila.org/artikoloj/movado/la-esperanto-urbo-r3...
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| English being an amalgamated language and thus uniquely
| flexible is part of its power. We have options in style choices
| many languages formally don't permit, _e.g._ when to italicise
| or, if quoting, whether to "exclude punctuation", or "include
| it." (As well as comma use.)
|
| As a fellow French speaker, I think these are strengths other
| languages could gain from. _Couriel_ or email (or e-mail)?
| Speaker's choice. Same for possession. (Particularly for a
| culture with a tradition of individual liberty like France.)
| dqv wrote:
| Just this morning I came across a guy called Mr Techpedia on
| YouTube and I was really surprised because I heard _a lot_ of
| English phrases but also phrases that are in a different
| language or a dialect of English I'm not familiar with. It
| was actually really cool. It also reminds me of a time when I
| heard someone codeswitch from US Midwestern English to
| Malaysian English - there was a clear difference in word
| choice and pronunciation. Global /Internet English as a
| concept is really cool as well. I often (accidentally) adopt
| grammatical constructions from Global English that I believe
| come from that particular speaker's native tongue.
|
| Anyway, yeah, I love this sort of mixing of languages and I'm
| glad a lot of cultures are more open about mixing in English.
| catlikesshrimp wrote:
| I am Spanish native, but the way I structure my sentence
| seems a google translation from chinese. People around me
| often don't understand the meaning, so I have to speak
| slower to structure my sentence in a more proper Spanish
| way.
|
| I suppose languages evolve around the way their
| corresponding population brains work. People can still
| learn other languages, or be native to other languages, but
| there is a language way that is the best fit to some people
| which is related to biology.
| int_19h wrote:
| There is no evidence for "biological inclination" towards
| certain languages. Take a Spanish kid and raise them on
| Chinese, and they'll speak it natively just fine, and
| vice versa.
|
| However, natural languages evolve _naturally_ , which
| means that they don't just suddenly randomly change, and
| that change is very gradual. So things tend to get stuck
| in historically-motivated local maximums that can be very
| different for different languages because of their
| different histories.
|
| There are some plausible theories around biologically
| motivated language features, but this tends to be about
| the environment - e.g. some sounds seem to be more common
| in languages spoken in high-altitude areas.
| wil421 wrote:
| 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...
| duped wrote:
| > Is English just badly pronounced French?
|
| Oh totally, my American accent sounds just like, "quand je
| vais au barbecue le quatre juillet, je vais manger un hot
| dog avec ketchup."
|
| > But it would be better than having 1,000s of badly
| pronounced French words in the language.
|
| They're loanwords that changed over time, they're not
| "badly" pronounced at all. French is filled with many
| loanwords as well that are pronounced nothing like their
| language of origin
| jcranmer wrote:
| > Is English just badly pronounced French?
|
| No, English is a Germanic language whose conjugation rules
| have severely atrophied, with (mostly specialized!)
| terminology liberally adopted from Latin, Greek, and other
| roots. In things like tense and aspect structure, I believe
| that English hews a lot closer to German than French.
| WalterBright wrote:
| English is a barbarian language with French nouns, as a
| result of the Norman conquest of England.
|
| Amusingly, using the French words is a signal to being
| upper class. Such as "purchase" (pourchacier) instead of
| "buy" (byan).
| int_19h wrote:
| Or stuff like "cow" (from Old English) vs "beef" (from
| Old French). Which kinda makes sense when you consider
| who grew meet vs who ate it.
|
| It's a pretty common thing worldwide, though. French
| played a similar role as upper class marker in many other
| countries that were influenced by it when France was at
| the peak of its global dominance. For Slavic languages,
| German also played this role at one point, and IIRC there
| is something similar historically with Chinese in areas
| in its cultural dominance.
| crucialfelix wrote:
| Cutlery (fr), silverware (de)
|
| I was taught that this is because the Normans pushed the
| Germanics out and up north. French dominated the royal
| court.
| neaden wrote:
| All non-Greek languages are barbarian, since apparently
| it sounds like we are saying barbarbar to the ancient
| Greeks.
| AStonesThrow wrote:
| Imagine how those Greeks resented scribes trying to
| separate words and phrases with spaces on precious
| vellum!
|
| Those crazy Masoretic Jews trying to pollute sacred texts
| with vowels... You're just supposed to know them!
|
| Punctuation was probably introduced by leaky quills
| dripping until someone put a positive spin on it.
|
| What twist of fate gave us ampersands? Lets keep Ye Olde
| English pure! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorn_(letter
| )#Modern_English
| MarkusWandel wrote:
| Boy have they atrophied. Even as a German speaker in
| whose first language these words have current equivalents
| I'm not 100% certain when to use thou, thee, thy, thine
| etc. that still were part of the language at
| Shakespeare's time and have since been simplified into
| you/your/yours etc. But it's true, English takes this
| stuff in stride, with modernisms e.g. "sick" meaning
| something good gradually being incorporated into the
| mainstream, rather than fought against by language
| purists.
| gavindean90 wrote:
| There are purists that complain. Importantly, we don't
| let them edit the dictionaries.
| neaden wrote:
| thou/you is formal and informal and the distinction
| largely depending on your relationship with the person
| and respective social ranks. There were times when one
| person (social superior) would use thou (informal) while
| the other (social inferior) was expected to use you
| (formal). So yeah, no hard and fast grammar rule on when
| to do it but would depend entirely on the culture and the
| speaker and listeners social position inside of it.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| No, initially thou was simply the singular, with you as
| the plural second person pronoun. You'd address one
| person as thou, a group of people as you (like some
| speakers use you vs y'all today). Thou, my friend vs You,
| my friends.
|
| Then, under French influence probably, the plural, you,
| started being used as a polite form as well (in French,
| like most romance languages, formal/polite language uses
| the plural form of pronouns and verbs when addressing a
| single person). Thou, my friend VS You, sir; similar to
| "toi, mon ami" vs "vous, monsieur".
|
| Then, this polite form using singular you became so
| widely used that thou was almost entirely dropped,
| especially since English also had little distinction
| between singular and plural in verbs in general. You, my
| friend, you, my friends.
|
| Then, as thou became more foreign to regular speakers, it
| briefly started being used as a polite form, essentially
| reversing the original meanings. You, my friend VS Thou,
| sir.
|
| This didn't last very long, so finally we ended up with
| the current state, where there is no polite form and you
| is the only second person pronoun. Except of course some
| speakers have started using y'all for a plural form, but
| that doesn't seem to be gaining any popularity outside a
| few areas.
| YawningAngel wrote:
| It's not a conjugation issue. "Champagne" is letter-for-
| letter identical in both languages, but pronounced
| differently for phonotactic reasons
| MarkusWandel wrote:
| It's a typical French loanword in German too:
| "Champagner" isn't pronounced with standard German
| prounciation rules. Even localized ones, e.g. in my
| childhood a sidewalk was called a "Trottoir" in the
| French pronunciation. For some reason nobody gets exited
| about French loanwords.
| SJC_Hacker wrote:
| English is a Germanic language with a Latin alphabet, as
| spoken by Celts, after being ruled by people from France
| who were originally from Norway (or maybe Denmark)
| eleveriven wrote:
| While English certainly has thousands of words that came
| from French, it is far from being a "badly pronounced"
| version of French.
| vineyardmike wrote:
| 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. It's just a cultural
| element formed over hundreds of years of government policy.
|
| 2. The origins of English is not French, but there are many
| words in English derived from French. But today they're
| English words, with a French history. There are many more
| words that are _not_ French in origin, so it's quite
| disingenuous to call English an "incorrect" or
| "mispronounced" French. Why is it not an "evolved" or
| "improved" French? (See point 1).
|
| 3. English is conjugated, it's just different than French.
| "I am, you are, he is". "I look, you look, he looks". Or
| more obviously "I jump, I jumped, I am jumping". Most of
| the French-origin words are also probably not verbs but
| nouns. That said, I have no data to back that up.
| ktosobcy wrote:
| 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...)
| BitwiseFool wrote:
| I jokingly suggest that, by definition, the only person who
| uses English properly and speaks without an accent is the
| King.
| anthk wrote:
| Hence the "Royal Academy of English" -> RAE, as in Real
| Academia Espanola.
| lenerdenator wrote:
| If it's English because the King speaks it, how come the
| most famous document written in (modern) English tells the
| King to take a hike?
| int_19h wrote:
| But the King is basically German. ~
| kps wrote:
| _Exeunt, bearing off the dead bodies; after which a peal
| of ordnance is shot off._
| SllX wrote:
| I've seen similar suggestions but one of the best things
| about English is that we don't have that nonsense. It would
| just be a source of annoyance and consternation adding more
| noise to news and politics in the Anglosphere.
| taylorius wrote:
| Nah, such a body would surely be the beginning of the end.
| Anarchy in the UK, including its language!
| eastbound wrote:
| France has the Academie Francaise. Well, no-one respects
| them. The first woman to enter it was Marguerite Yourcenar
| and she was strongly antifeminist; And they said to not use
| the Francais.e.s spelling and rather keep the usual
| "Francais(es)", and suddenly all administrations started
| the dot-based version.
| onlypassingthru wrote:
| 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_.
| martijnarts wrote:
| For what it's worth, French is also controlled by speakers.
| The pompous authority is just lagging behind.
| seszett wrote:
| There is not authority for french, it's a myth.
|
| The Academie has no authority whatsoever, it's little
| more than a club for writers. The Education Ministry has
| authority for school programs and what is accepted in
| French language classes, but only in France. It only ever
| allows new uses, never forbids previously allowed things.
|
| The OQLF (and French language Ministry) has a broader
| authority within Quebec, but only for Quebec.
|
| The Ministry of Culture has some authority within the
| Brussels-Wallonia federation but it's quite limited.
|
| No idea what it's like in Switzerland.
|
| But there is no global authority for the French language
| (unlike German or Dutch for example). The language
| evolves by consensus.
| r00fus wrote:
| You do realize that what people actually speak (in France)
| differs quite a bit from the Academie Francaise. 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.
| graypegg wrote:
| There are specific subsets of English that are used in
| certain domains that have standards bodies behind them, like
| Simplified Technical English for aviation. It even has a
| working group! [0]
|
| VOA also have a Learning English spec for broadcast english
| [1] but that seems to be a lot looser of a spec.
|
| So it's definitely not impossible. The funny thing, is I
| remember being told in grade school that in English Canada, I
| was to write numbers with a space as the thousands separator.
| `$10 000.00`, instead of `$10,000.00`. This is because french
| Canada uses a comma as a decimal point, `10 000.00 $`, so a
| space is non ambiguous. I have rarely ever seen the English
| space format in use here. I don't think English speakers
| would respect any authority if it wasn't as domain-scoped as
| Aviation or Learning english.
|
| [0] https://www.asd-ste100.org/ [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/
| wiki/Learning_English_(version_of_E...
| speakeron wrote:
| The use of a space as a thousands separator has been around
| since the 1940s as recommended by the International Bureau
| of Weights and Measures and it was what we used when I was
| a kid at school in the UK. They specified it should be a
| thin (half) space.
|
| https://www.bipm.org/documents/20126/28433818/working-
| docume...
| graypegg wrote:
| No I know, it's also part of the French standard. Just
| more so commenting on how uncommon it is from Canadian
| English speakers despite it being the Canadian English
| "standard" recommend by a Canadian entity similar to the
| French or German standards bodies.
| michaelt wrote:
| _> 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.
| catlikesshrimp wrote:
| Imagine either England or the USA accepting to vary their
| language towards a common standard. I expect strong
| opposition would stem from pride.
| int_19h wrote:
| FWIW while comma vs period for decimal fractions is a point
| of significant variability globally, the use of comma to
| group digits is fairly uncommon, whereas period is
| universally understood as a decimal separator even in
| countries where comma is normally used for that purpose
| (thanks to calculators and computers). And, on the other
| hand, space-separated groups are self-explanatory for those
| used to comma for that purpose. So using spaces for
| grouping + period for fractions is indeed the way to go to
| maximum readability worldwide.
| partiallypro wrote:
| One reason English is so popular (aside from pure economics)
| and that other countries quickly adopt English slang words is
| because we don't have such a thing.
| tivert wrote:
| > 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 ;)
|
| That's even less likely now than in the past, with the elite
| cultural trends in English-speaking countries favoring the
| adoption of foreign spellings _and_ pronunciation. That just
| piles on the complexity to unmanageable levels.
|
| IMHO, for instance, there's no excuse for the requirement
| that English newspaper readers know Pinyin [1], rather than
| some more English-friendly romanization system, to be able to
| read news about China, when Chinese speakers themselves use a
| completely different, non-roman writing system. What's next,
| just printing the Chinese characters without romanization?
| Pinyin has its uses, but writing things out for foreigners is
| not something it does well.
|
| [1] which gives many letters _very_ unexpected values (e.g. c
| = ts) and many vowels are impossible for an English-speaker
| to guess correctly.
| hosh wrote:
| Pinyin is pretty good at rendering Manderin in a Latin
| script. Can you elaborate on what you mean by "English-
| friendly"?
| tivert wrote:
| > 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
| English orthography (e.g. do not use "c" for "ts", use
| the closest approximate for sounds that do no exist in
| English) instead of maximal fidelity to the foreign
| language.
| hosh wrote:
| 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.
| tivert wrote:
| > 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.
|
| It's not an issue of cultural dominance, as no one would
| be forcing the Chinese to change their names or their
| pronunciations. It's basically just keeping English from
| being even more unmanageable, in a way many other
| languages do, including Chinese.
|
| If an English name or other word is used in Chinese (or
| in Japanese, or many other languages) it gets localized.
| For instance, watch this video:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ix2xYvMcW2A. The Chinese
| speakers are mostly talking about Trump, but the only
| name I could actually pick out was Obama's (probably
| because "Trump" is hard to pronounce in Chinese).
|
| Apparently the Xinhua decided to render "Trump" as Te
| Lang Pu /Te Lang Pu (https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/
| world/2017/01/25/china-d...), instead of doing the
| American/English thing of "You don't know their language?
| Well f-you then. No help from us."
|
| Also, the English use of Pinyin can have some unfortunate
| effects. I used to work with a man who's last name was
| Cao whose name was mispronounced "Cow" almost 100% of the
| time (there was a strong preference for first-name use in
| the office, so it rarely happened to his face).
| samatman wrote:
| There are basically political reasons for this. Wade-Giles
| is associated with Taiwan, and is in fact mostly used when
| referring to Taiwanese subjects, I've always seen Kaohsiung
| for the city, never Gaoxiong.
|
| The Mainlanders would find it very insulting to not use
| Pinyin when referring to subjects in the PRC, so
| understandably, American journalism goes along with that.
|
| For what it's worth I think both systems have different
| disadvantages, in that neither does a good job of
| reflecting the actual pronunciation of Guoyu. Excuse me,
| Putonghua. Doing so with the English character set isn't
| actually possible.
| int_19h wrote:
| It's not the character set that's the problem so much so
| as the set of phonemes. English just doesn't have the s/c
| distinction, and no amount of creative spelling choices
| can fix that. Other things are much more straightforward,
| tones aside.
| makeitdouble wrote:
| For what it's worth CJK countries tend to give less weight
| to how foreign names are pronounced.
|
| For instance the current PRC secretary name is pronounced
| accordingly to the characters' reading in Taiwan and Japan,
| and won't have much in common. Same way Chinese people will
| read Japanese name as the characters sound to them, without
| referring to the actual Japanese reading, even if in Japan
| these names have a designated original reading.
| int_19h wrote:
| "c" for "ts" has a very long history in Latin script -
| pretty much all Slavic languages and many other Eastern
| European languages that use Latin use it in this manner, as
| does German in many cases. That's why it also has this
| meaning in Esperanto.
|
| I do agree that the currently dominant English convention
| of adopting spelling from other languages (or their
| standard Romanization system) as is - or worse yet,
| dropping all the diacritics but keeping everything else as
| is - is misguided. But it doesn't help that English
| spelling can get very unwieldy when trying to spell
| something phonetically, especially across many dialects of
| English due to considerable variability in how things are
| pronounced. This has also caused problems - for an example
| of that, look at the still-common Korean Romanization of
| names such as "Park" which does _not_ accurately represent
| the actual pronunciation if you pronounce it as an American
| would ( "r" is silent - it reflects the non-rhotic British
| pronunciation, and was put there because the more
| straightforward "Pak" would tend to be pronounced
| incorrectly by a Brit).
| meyum33 wrote:
| 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.
| gtk40 wrote:
| And it is not just the US. In the UK from my limited
| experience visiting they use a mess of different units
| commonly. Certainly not all in on metric.
| tannhaeuser wrote:
| I think the article's wording
|
| > _guidelines issued by the body regulating the use of
| Standard High German orthography_
|
| gives a somewhat false impression regarding the influence and
| standing of this body. Orthography was traditionally what was
| written in the _Duden_ dictionary /thesaurus. Only in 2004 or
| so there was a push for a moderate reform for German as
| taught in schools, and it was deemed necessary to have at
| least Austria and Switzerland join (hence the council isn't a
| natioval body), whereas neighbouring countries with German-
| speaking minorities such as Italy were not sitting at the
| table it seems.
| scheme271 wrote:
| But those standardisation bodies often get ignored by most of
| the speakers. Language is a living thing that evolves and
| changes in spite of the dictates of academies. Also, with
| global usage, any given body is not going to be able to do
| much, e.g. a chilean spanish speaker won't care what the RAE
| says or a Quebecois would probably laugh at what the French
| language academy dictates.
| chimeracoder wrote:
| > There are also a measurable economical issues for non-
| English-native nations to have to use the de facto lingua-
| franca of the day that is English. Of course neither German nor
| French would be a better alternative as a global international
| neutral language.
|
| > To my knowledge, the only proposal that gained some modest
| but significant results on that side over the last century is
| Esperanto. You know, the language against which France has put
| its veto has it was proposed as language of communication in
| League of Nations (1920s) or UNESCO (1954) and still is
| unhelpful with its adoption in United Nations.
|
| Esperanto is not a "global international neutral language"
| either. While artificially constructed, it's functionally a
| Romance language, deriving over 80% of its vocabulary as well
| as the majority of its grammatical structure from Latin and/or
| Romance languages. The majority of the remainder comes from
| other European languages, primarily Germanic languages.
| int_19h wrote:
| Esperanto is indeed not culturally neutral (and was never
| supposed to be), but it's still vastly better in practice
| than other European languages precisely because of this
| overemphasis on Latin (and Greek) roots - because those are
| exactly the "fancy" words that tended to be borrowed most
| often historically even across language families.
|
| Also, interestingly enough, Esperanto attracted more interest
| in some Asian countries - most notably, Japan - than in much
| of Europe.
|
| I think the bigger problem with Esperanto is phonology. It's
| too heavy on affricates, including some relatively rare ones
| (e.g. phonemic "ts"), and the consonant clusters get pretty
| bad. For someone coming from a simple CV language, those are
| likely to be a bigger challenge than the word list.
| deng wrote:
| But this is not even about language, it's about spelling. For
| some reason, people forget that these are entirely different
| things. We are currently communicating in a language where
| there's often times no relation between the written and spoken
| word at all.
| samatman wrote:
| A more accurate statement is that English is a language where
| spelling often reflects history and etymology, rather than
| phonetics.
|
| There's always a relation between a spoken word and its
| written representation, they're the same thing in different
| mediums.
| makeitdouble wrote:
| If we're going for accuracy, your statement would have to
| explain how it goes for other situations, for instance:
|
| - words spoken by toddlers: what's the spelling of a word
| that doesn't exist outside of a kid's brain ? In particular
| parents can accept it as a word without ever setting an
| associated writing.
|
| - written words that don't have a pronounciation: typically
| Latin is dead and how any of it is pronounced is up to how
| we feel about it.
|
| That's without going into words with phonems unrelated to
| their written form (XIV as fourteen for instance) and I
| assume there will be words that exchange spelling and
| pronounciation with others.
|
| Languages are plenty weird, we should embrace their
| weirdity IMHO.
| WalterBright wrote:
| > typically Latin is dead and how any of it is pronounced
| is up to how we feel about it.
|
| How words were pronounced can be deduced from poetry.
| makeitdouble wrote:
| That gives an hint on which words had similar endings,
| but there's still a chance we're wrong about how these
| endings sound in the first place.
| WalterBright wrote:
| > but there's still a chance we're wrong
|
| Of course. But it's not like we know nothing about it.
| int_19h wrote:
| That's not uncommon in general, but English is a
| particularly bad instance of that, partly because it has so
| many prominent source languages with widely different
| spellings, and partly because of the lack of any
| significant spelling reforms for a very long time.
|
| There was an interesting study
| (https://aclanthology.org/2021.sigtyp-1.1/) where they
| evaluated phonemicity of various language orthographies by
| training a neural net and then seeing how accurately it
| could predict things. Of two dozen languages they had
| there, the only ones that scored worse for writing are
| French and Chinese, but most notably, English is the only
| one that scored below 50% accuracy for _reading_ , and with
| a significant gap at that. This is very unfortunate for an
| international language, since reading is kind of the most
| basic practical thing you can usually do with a second
| language.
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| > A more accurate statement is that English is a language
| where spelling often reflects history and etymology, rather
| than phonetics.
|
| I hate that the past tense of "stay" is "stayed", but "say"
| is "said" and "pay" is "paid", which is often misspelled as
| "payed", which IS a word, but is unrelated to transferring
| money from one person to another.
|
| Then you got all the ways "-ough" is pronounced. Thorough,
| enough, cough, through, thought, dough, drought..."-ough"
| is now looking like a completely nonsense letter sequence.
| fredgrott wrote:
| 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...
| Muromec wrote:
| Why invent Esperanto if Dutch already exists and is the most
| reasonable European language to learn.
| lolc wrote:
| Finally a modest proposal to unite the European people.
| makeitdouble wrote:
| > lingua-franca of the day that is English. Of course neither
| German nor French would be a better alternative as a global
| international neutral language.
|
| Being a linga-frinca has nothing to do with merits though.
|
| Aside from "linga franca" being literally "French", it's a
| matter of which group of nations have a tremendously dominant
| position on the international scene. If China was to take hold
| of India and Russia and set the rules for the rest of the
| world, the defacto linga-frinca won't be English for long,
| however intricate people might feel about Chinese.
| dbrueck wrote:
| Mal: "We got work to do, dong ma?"
| sjm wrote:
| When I lived in Bordeaux I remember seeing billboards basically
| advising young people to not use "txt speak" and instead write
| "real French" to preserve the language.
| nicbou wrote:
| 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's somewhat sad that every culture is slowly becoming
| a vaguely American, California-based culture.
|
| Language and culture are intertwined. I feel that with the
| globalisation of both, something of value is lost. It's only
| right to feel concerned about it.
| jjtheblunt wrote:
| I wonder if the spread of English is because it's like a
| barycenter pulled by multiple languages, so not too far
| afield if coming from any of those languages.
| gavindean90 wrote:
| My thoughts are that any language that can embed other
| languages in it has the capacity to be a global lingua
| franca. English was firstest with the mostest.
| colechristensen wrote:
| I think it has a lot more to do with the global British
| Empire pre-WWI followed by American dominance post WWII.
| Perhaps there's an argument that the success of both had at
| least a small contribution from the characteristics of the
| language.
| burningChrome wrote:
| >> 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
| version) versions of the language. She did extensive research
| on the origins of the language and why they diverged.
|
| Absolutely fascinating work.
|
| On a lighter note, I happened to play hockey with many, many
| Canadian players. My best friend was from Ottawa and
| everybody asked him if he spoke French and said he did and
| said, "Its like here, you feel like you're speaking French
| with a Kentucky accent." which always got a good laugh from
| our teammates.
| int_19h wrote:
| 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 insanely large
| vowel inventories. Compared to _that_ , Esperanto is relatively
| simple, but when you look outside of Europe, having 3-consonant
| clusters or phonemic contrast between plosives and affricates
| at the same place of articulation (e.g. "t" vs "ts") is very
| unhelpful.
|
| That said, it's still a massive improvement on English
| phonologically. Even if you only consider the simpler American
| varieties, the three-way ae/a/a distinction alone (as in bat vs
| but vs bar) is a huge WTF for anyone coming from a typical
| 5-vowel system. And then you have consonants like th and d that
| don't have clear 1:1 counterparts in most other languages,
| often not even as allophones of something else that you could
| point at.
|
| Still, if you want to see what a more modern take on the
| concept might look like, I believe Globasa
| (https://www.globasa.net/eng) is the most active project along
| those lines. Of course, realistically, the likelihood of it
| actually being adopted as the universal language is effectively
| nil, but then that's also the case for Esperanto.
| freeone3000 wrote:
| Living in Quebec, I see the perspective. It's not that there is
| a particular hatred of english; there is simply an explicit
| exclusion of anything non-French. From such a perspective, it
| doesn't matter if the One World Global Language is English or
| Cantonese or Esperanto, it must be fought against to preserve
| French
| EasyMark wrote:
| I don't know but a very large and vocal portion of Americans
| would also flip out if something as basic as a new way to
| indicate possession was to be added to the English language.
| "Bending a knee to the _____________'s"
| Terr_ wrote:
| > lingua-franca
|
| Aside: I used to assume the term referred to how French was
| once "the language of diplomacy", but it really comes from
| "Frankish", at a time when "Franks" was a broad term for
| peoples of what is now western Europe.
| nomilk wrote:
| I knew of a building named Water's Edge, but spelled "Waters
| Edge". The absence of a possessive apostrophe was bothersome but
| I realised there's a case for sacrificing correctness for things
| like ease of communication and how the words look.
|
| An insight from Oscar Wilde:
|
| > Mr. Noel, in one of his essays, speaks with much severity of
| those who prefer sound to sense in poetry. No doubt, this is a
| very wicked thing to do. But he himself is guilty of a much
| graver sin against art when, in his desire to emphasise the
| meaning of Chatterton, he destroys Chatterton's music. In the
| modernised version he provides of the wonderful Songe to AElla,
| he mars the poem's metrical beauty with his corrections, ruins
| the rhymes, and robs the music of its echo. [1]
|
| (^^ that's from a short but wonderful essay, worth reading!)
|
| [1]
| https://ia800203.us.archive.org/23/items/collectedworksau12w...
| mattlondon wrote:
| But Waters Edge is totally fine if they mean "by the edge of
| the waters" and not "the edge belongs to the water".
|
| But hey, there are no rules or logic in English so have at it!
| nomilk wrote:
| I _think_ I understand:
|
| I thought about trees:
|
| Tree leaves (leaves from a tree)
|
| Trees leaves (same but from more than one variety of tree)
|
| Same logic for water:
|
| Water edge (an edge that happens to be of a body of water)
|
| Waters edge (same but of more than one body of water)
| f33d5173 wrote:
| In tree leaves, it could be leaves from a single tree or
| multiple trees. Hence, you can't pluralize tree into trees
| leaves, tree isn't allowed to recieve a plural there. If
| you write it as tree's leaves, then tree is singular, and
| the form is possessive (whereas before it served to
| disambiguate from, say, leaves of a book). Then you can
| also pluralize tree to trees' leaves, and now it's leaves
| from multiple trees.
| nomilk wrote:
| Would the same logic also invalidate 'waters edge'?
| dylan604 wrote:
| > Tree leaves (leaves from a tree)
|
| or it could be the single tree is vacating the area
|
| > Trees leaves (same but from more than one variety of
| tree)
|
| or multiple trees are vacating the area
|
| we could equally turn edge into a verb as well. so now we
| have a whole other meaning outside of an apostrophe
| penteract wrote:
| I'd add that "waters" doesn't need to mean more than one
| body of water. It can be used somewhat poetically to refer
| to water in a single body. First example I could find:
| https://biblehub.com/joshua/3-8.htm
| Andrex wrote:
| Hmm, it seems like water can be plural or singular purely
| depending on the author's preference. I didn't realize that
| until now.
| underlipton wrote:
| Yeah, that could totally be by design. For example,the book
| "Rainbows End" is not "Rainbow's End" specifically because
| the meaning of the first is intended, not the second.
| gerikson wrote:
| We see these in Swedish too and they're just as incorrect,
| grammatically.
|
| But the worst thing is usually the acute accent is used instead
| of a real apostrophe, which just makes it stand out even more.
| aejfghalsgjbae wrote:
| You get that a lot in Germany and the grave accent too, as with
| "Rosi`s" in the article image. I guess the acute accent is
| laziness because unlike the apostrophe, it doesn't need the
| shift key on a standard German keyboard layout. The grave
| accent is at shift+' so just weird.
| glitchc wrote:
| Meanwhile in English we have our own apostrophe catastrophe where
| it's become commonplace online to add one to a plural.
| FireBeyond wrote:
| Or the Americanism of double quotes for emphasis:
|
| > Bob's "Big" Bookstore!
| morsch wrote:
| Also quite common in Germany. I choose to interpret them as
| scare quotes implying irony and smile to myself at Bob's
| "Big" Bookstore and the grocer selling "fresh" fish.
| bee_rider wrote:
| I've always read those as scare-quotes, like the store is
| making fun of itself in some self-aware fashion for not being
| big. I know I am wrong but I would rather be wrong is a
| slightly funnier and less stupid world.
| pfdietz wrote:
| Is that for emphasis, or is that to cast doubt on the word?
| g-b-r wrote:
| Is that really common?
| kristjansson wrote:
| Even worse with food.
|
| > Bob's "Best" Burgers
|
| what's wrong with the burgers??
| almostnormal wrote:
| Speaking of the English language influencing German, I want my
| Erdbeermarmelade back. I don't care that english marmalde cannot
| be made of strawberries.
| greenicon wrote:
| It seems the EU laws for this have changed last year [1], to
| allow Erdbeermarmelade again.
|
| 1: I was only able to find something in German:
| https://www.wiwo.de/politik/ausland/realsatire-aus-bruessel-...
| zelphirkalt wrote:
| Phew, that was close. What would we do without our
| Erdbeermarmelade.
| yamazakiwi wrote:
| Why would you not be able to make it out of Strawberries? You
| can make Marmalade with any fruit. :)
| xandrius wrote:
| Generally marmalade is made out of citrus fruits.
| yamazakiwi wrote:
| Of course but it doesn't have to be. There are tons of
| fruits that make great tasting marmalades. After watching
| the Mexican episode of British Bake Off I don't care about
| their opinions on food authenticity.
| OptionOfT wrote:
| Austria and German-speaking Switzerland, lists "Eva's
| Blumenladen" (Eva's Flower Shop) and "Peter's Taverne" (Peter's
| Tavern) as usable alternatives, though "Eva's Brille" ("Eva's
| glasses") remains incorrect.
|
| Why is 'Eva's Brille incorrect', but 'Eva's Blumenladen' ok?
| colanderman wrote:
| The former are names of businesses, the latter is just
| referring to someone's personal item.
|
| (This confused the heck out of me at first too.)
| aeyes wrote:
| But I can style the name of my business however I want,
| "E'v'a's Blumenladen" is correct because I say so. I don't
| need anyones approval.
| carlmr wrote:
| In Germany you need approval for business names.
| croes wrote:
| Peter's Taverne is the name of the tavern, Eva's Brille is just
| eva's glasses not a the name of her store.
|
| So Evas Blumenladen is called Eva's Blumenladen is correct.
| maxnoe wrote:
| 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.
| OptionOfT wrote:
| Oh shoot, I read it as Eva's Glasses, the name of her eyewear
| shop.
| qwertox wrote:
| That would be "Eva's Brillenladen".
| Semaphor wrote:
| That's not a given, the store could easily be called
| "Eva's Brille", I'd say that's even more likely than the
| archaic sounding Brillenladen.
| abeppu wrote:
| ... 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"?
| jameshart wrote:
| Absolutely. You don't need to come up with fake examples.
| Take a couple of high end British retail establishments:
| Harrods and Selfridges, founded by Messers Harrod and
| Selfridge, and neither styles itself with an apostrophe.
| cardiffspaceman wrote:
| CAESARS is correct because it's a palace of Caesars, not of the
| Caesar. Something to think about while you're stuck in Las
| Vegas traffic.
|
| https://www.caesars.com/caesars-palace/things-to-do/nightlif...
| croes wrote:
| That's like changing the spelling of Espresso to Expresso
| deng wrote:
| It's not, unless you are able to hear a difference between
| "Tea's Buchladen" and "Teas Buchladen".
| croes wrote:
| It is because it's just giving in to the habit of some
| people.
| deng wrote:
| So I suppose you never gave in and you still vehemently
| write "bureau" instead of "Buro"?
|
| It's just spelling. Also, please check your old Duden,
| Regel 16b, you will be surprised.
| int_19h wrote:
| There's an obvious upside for those people. Is there any
| obvious downside for everyone else?
| subpixel wrote:
| I lived in Germany on two occasions and regularly consume German
| media. English words are all over the German vernacular, to the
| point that it's really, really annoying.
| guitarbill wrote:
| It's pretty crazy how quickly it happened/happens. The
| Deppenapostroph is maybe less problematic; I see it more as a
| simplification just like the dative replacing the genitive. But
| Denglish really just makes everything harder to understand;
| even if you are fluent in both English and German the
| "switching" is tiresome. Still, maybe we should get rid of
| "handy" and "beamer" first...
|
| Ironically, even British English has the issue of Americanisms
| sneaking in, see e.g. the IT Crowd episode: "How hard is it to
| remember 911?" "You mean 999? That's the American one".
| pjmlp wrote:
| As someone living here for the last 20 years, and also nowadays
| understands a bit of dialects and related slag, it is kind of
| curious the amount of Denglish words among the youth.
|
| For example, "Hast Du das gepruft?" quickly turns into "Hast du
| das gecheckt?".
| guitarbill wrote:
| Huh, "Hast du das gechecked?" used to mean "Hast du das
| kapiert?", with a quite negative connotation.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Depends on the context, at least based on my experience
| from 1live and Cosmo interviews, and some TV series.
| zolbrek wrote:
| 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 way you'd say it in English as
| best as he could. I had pronounced it schtrippas.
| hilux wrote:
| Similar in India. E.g. you cannot find a news report in Hindi
| that doesn't contain at least a smattering of English words.
| subpixel wrote:
| Just wait until they get ahold of the quotation marks:
| https://www.reddit.com/r/suspiciousquotes/
| ExoticPearTree wrote:
| Oh no... anyway.
|
| Seriously, who cares that some organizational body in Germany has
| an issue with the English language? :)
| deng wrote:
| Here, too?
|
| As the articles notes, this kind of apostrophe has been "correct"
| for many, many years, at least for names, and no, not just for
| avoiding confusion with names ending in 's'. The "Duden" (one of
| the officially recognized authorities for German spelling) has
| had the example "Willi's Wurstchenbude" for many years, despite
| "Willis" not being a common name in Germany.
|
| Now that one tries to simplify things, the Cliff Clavins of
| Germany freak out because they lose one example where they could
| feel smarter than others. There really is nothing to see here.
| cs702 wrote:
| Reading this, I come away with the impression that European
| languages today are evolving due to the influence of "Vulgar
| English" (the lowest common denominator of English spoken by the
| most people worldwide), analogously to how Romance languages like
| Spanish and French evolved in the past due to the influence of
| "Vulgar Latin."[a]
|
| ---
|
| [a] https://www.britannica.com/topic/Romance-languages
| adamc wrote:
| Languages change. I'm always amused that we get upset by that,
| but it's going to keep happening.
| pjmlp wrote:
| You forgot the part when it was cool to speak French among
| higher classes, and thus it got spread into many European
| languages as well.
| xdennis wrote:
| > Romance languages [...] evolved in the past due to the
| influence of "Vulgar Latin."
|
| Minor correction: they are derived, not influenced by Vulgar
| Latin.
|
| That's why so many words are different from Classical Latin,
| but similar between Romance languages. Like how Latin for house
| is "domus", but Romance languages use casa/casa/chez because
| common people referred to their house by the word "casa".
| wrzuteczka wrote:
| Weird twist: Slavic languages use words very similar to
| "domus" for "house", for example, "dom" in Polish or "dom" in
| Ukrainian.
| Muromec wrote:
| That's dim, not dom, but of course it's "vdoma" and "u
| domi" for reasons.
| Wytwwww wrote:
| Also Ancient Greek, Albanian, Sanskrit, Ancient Iranian
| etc. Supposedly even "timber" (in English) is somehow
| derived from the the same root ..
| int_19h wrote:
| Slavic is somewhat more conservative and still has a bunch
| of archaic proto-Slavic and even proto-Indo-European stuff
| in it. Even most of the basic swearwords are still readily
| recognizable from PIE, which I always found particularly
| amusing:
|
| https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-
| Slavic/x...
|
| https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-
| Slavic/p...
|
| https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-
| Slavic/j...
|
| https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-
| Slavic/b...
|
| https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-
| Slavic/g...
| cs702 wrote:
| I agree! Nothing I wrote disagrees with that:
|
| The phrasing "evolved in the past due to the influence of"
| has a more expansive meaning than "influenced by."
| mlinksva wrote:
| Maybe English/Globish should go in the opposite direction.
| Apostrophes, at least for the genitive case, are awfully
| annoying: curly/non-curly, extra character, not pronounced,
| uncouth... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apostrophe#Criticism
| lovecg wrote:
| Oh well, at least we don't need help highlighting every noun in a
| sentence.
| jjk166 wrote:
| Reminds me of the story:
|
| > A Pan Am 727 flight, waiting for start clearance in Munich,
| overheard the following:
|
| > Lufthansa (in German): "Ground, what is our start clearance
| time?"
|
| > Ground (in English): "If you want an answer you must speak in
| English."
|
| > Lufthansa (in English): "I am a German, flying a German
| airplane, in Germany. Why must I speak English?"
|
| > Unknown voice from another plane (in a beautiful British
| accent): "Because you lost the bloody war"
| ktosobcy wrote:
| As a Pole I'm also fairly annoyed by having to use English
| daily ;)
| phkahler wrote:
| In the air traffic example it's required so everyone on the
| radio can understand everything going on around them.
| falcor84 wrote:
| I might regret saying it, but I think we as humanity should go
| back to wars being definitively won, rather than dragging on
| indefinitely. It's obviously a poor metaphor, but I'm thinking
| of something like the "Fifty-move rule" in chess - e.g. if no
| significant area changed sides in e.g. 100 days, then we
| officially redraw the maps (by treaty if possible), cease
| hostilities and let people rebuild and get on with their lives.
| int_19h wrote:
| There's no authority that can enforce such a rule.
| mattlondon wrote:
| "idiot's apostrophe" or to call it another way "how the English
| speakers do it" is quite offensive to a native English speaker!
| Thanks Germany.
| cafard wrote:
| Given the long and deplorable influence of German on American
| scholarly prose, this inspires only Schadenfreude.
|
| I'm not singling out the Germans, mind you. I smirk also when the
| French complain of American modes of thought polluting their
| schools: when municipal bureaucrats let contracts not for
| demolition but for deconstruction, I say that we have injuries to
| avenge.
| hyggetrold wrote:
| I'm a little about myself that I understood this plus the deep
| cuts. Well done.
| orwin wrote:
| 'deconstruction' in the French theory was only use by Derrida
| as a mean to critique a literary work.
|
| What it means is that you only judge the works by itself. You
| should not judge it by the standards of the time you read it,
| nor by the standard of the time it was written, nor by its
| author life. You judge it by its internal contradictions, its
| hypocrisy. Your external knowledge should have no impact on how
| you judge the quality of literary works. How to do that? You
| find contradictions, and that's what deconstruction is, a mean
| to find internal contradictions.
|
| How deconstruction is pollution in your mind? Please, tell me.
|
| I'll tell you what happened. People don't read, they parrot
| idiotic beliefs they heard/read from other idiots who didn't
| grasp it in the first place, in order to singe knowledge or
| competency they don't have. It's American scholars who used
| deconstruction to mean something other than Derrida's
| definition, and north American idiots who conflated the two,
| then podcasted their beliefs without reading the man once, and
| expended their idiocy to other, gullible people who can't read
| themselves (not their fault, when you work a straining job I
| understand reading Derrida isn't your priority).
| cafard wrote:
| I did not say that deconstruction was pollution. I do think
| that many of a generation of American scholars found it hard
| to write or think other than in terms worked out in Paris
| between the mid-1950s and the early 1970s.
|
| I used the word "polluting" in referring to American thought
| as influencing French, and that perhaps was a little strong.
| What I had in mind is mentioned for example in
| https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-59584125.
| orwin wrote:
| yeah, sorry, i was talking about the "injuries to avenge".
|
| > I do think that many of a generation of American scholars
| found it hard to write or think other than in terms worked
| out in Paris between the mid-1950s and the early 1970s.
|
| None of the american scholars are postmodern, i'm pretty
| sure postmodernism died with the first Gulf war, or at
| least post 9-11 in France, on account on Baudrillard's
| book. It wasn't even really present in the US because in
| the US, Habermas and the Frankfurt school were way, way
| more popular than postmodernism, which was seen as
| unintelligible and way to complicated. Habermas wrote a
| virulent critique of postmodernism in "The Philosophical
| Discourse of Modernity", and that buried Foucault, Lyotard
| and a bit of Baudrillard in the US.
|
| The fact that idiots who fake their knowledge in north
| America say that Postmodernism and Frankfurt school
| Critical theory are the same when they criticize each other
| so much the best arguments against PM is from Habermas and
| one of the only common point between all postmodern authors
| were their rejection of Hegel's dialectic and
| metanarratives (yeah, when said like this you might think
| Nietzsche was the first postmodern author) is fun. It is
| also really postmodern though.
|
| What really grind my gears is that the same type of people
| who argue against "postmodernism" (that they don't
| understand) seems to understand how politics are linked
| with science and authority through at least the language
| (in my country, the "masks are useless, don't create
| shortage for nurses"/"masks are usefull, everybody should
| wear one" was a plain example of that). Which is _exactly_
| what Lyotard describe in "the postmodern condition". They
| _totally_ agree with the single most postmodern book, they
| just don't know it. Which is fine. What is not fine is
| holding this opinion on science and politics then
| criticizing postmodernism for stuff it's not, or just
| broadly without explaining why. It shows that those
| shitheads don't know what they are talking about, they
| either didn't understand, or didn't read (i'm quite certain
| it's the second). The issue is when gullible, uninformed
| people believe them. Which was fine when it was americans,
| but now some French people believe it too and not only i
| have to fight those misconceptions online, i have to
| explain to people IRL how gullible they are and how idiotic
| their favorite anglo podcaster is.
| orwin wrote:
| I'll also link something i have in my pockets, because _I
| want_ people to understand how brilliant and ahead of
| their time Lyotard and Baudrillard were (and talking
| about them as if they "injured" anything is nonsense).
| It's a 5-10 minute read, in english, and probably the
| best, shortest resource ever to understand postmodernism
| (it's kind of inaccurate though, but i don't want to
| nitpick when it's a 100 times better than what you read
| elsewhere):
|
| https://www.webpages.uidaho.edu/~sflores/KlagesPostmodern
| ism...
| hilux wrote:
| In English, "Schadenfreude" is not capitalized!
| zelphirkalt wrote:
| Background: In German you would not add an " ' " when you want to
| express something belonging to something. You would simply add an
| "s" in most cases. Example: "Marias books are at home.", not
| "Maria's books are at home."
| pjmlp wrote:
| It is actually explained in the article, with mention to
| Barbaras Rhabarberbar.
| thomastjeffery wrote:
| For an article about linguistics, that title sure is hard to
| read.
| oniony wrote:
| I read somewhere that the apostrophe in English was _only_ used
| to show elision, but that in Old English the genitive form
| changed the word ending to 'es', so the apostrophe was just
| indicating the 'e' had been removed.
|
| For example 'hund' (dog) becomes "hundes" in the genitive form
| and was written "hund's" when the 'e' was elided.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Extra points for the Barbaras Rhabarberbar mention.
| Tainnor wrote:
| While I personally dislike this for "aesthetic" reasons, I do
| recognise that languages change and that's fine. It used to be
| that very few people would read and write, but with the advent of
| the internet, text messaging, etc., written language is also
| evolving more "democratically", similar to spoken language. There
| are also technological forces at work: I've mostly given up on
| writing compound words the proper way on mobile phones, because
| it just doesn't work well with autocompletion, for example.
|
| That said, I really dislike how "bureaucratic" German spelling
| rules are, including this recent addition. Instead of blanket
| allowing the use of an apostrophe for the genitive (at least for
| personal names), the new rule allows it only in very specific
| circumstances. I'm of the opinion that nobody should have to
| consult a complicated rulebook in order to write well (in fact,
| the best way is to just simply read a lot and then mimic what you
| read).
|
| Then again, most people don't need to care about what is or isn't
| considered proper spelling. In theory it should matter for
| official documents etc., but that doesn't mean that those never
| contain errors (quite the contrary, in my experience).
| carlmr wrote:
| >the new rule allows it only in very specific circumstances.
| I'm of the opinion that nobody should have to consult a
| complicated rulebook in order to write well
|
| Exactly. If you ask me it kind of makes sense to have it for
| possesive (not plural) use anyway. It clarifies that the s is
| not part of the name but serves a different function.
| asimpletune wrote:
| English had been so heavily influenced by European languages that
| it's just a funny coincidence that we're alive to see the
| opposite happening. It feels like half (or more) of Italian words
| have English cognates or they're so close you could consider them
| a slant cognate.
|
| Another thing is that what happened in the article is something
| that has occurred a lot in English too. I think a few years back
| they permitted "myriad of" just because it was so common a
| mistake. This happened even though myriad is supposed to be used
| exactly like the words "numerous" or "many" and shouldn't be
| followed by an "of". Still, despite having simple examples of
| similar words, like numerous, people just couldn't stop saying
| "myriad of".
|
| I see it all the time now. I wouldn't say I love the change, but
| I don't get upset about it or correct people, since it's
| technically perfectly alright now, even if it's accepted for sort
| of a sad reason.
| everforward wrote:
| I believe using "of" is correct when using "myriad" as a noun,
| the same as "many" or "number" (the noun form of numerous). "He
| had a great number of seashells", "she possessed a myriad of
| skills".
|
| Apparently it used to/still means 10,000 so it should be usable
| anywhere 10,000 is. "There were a myriad of them"/"there were
| 10,000 of them".
| asimpletune wrote:
| O that's funny. Apparently it was originally a noun, hundreds
| of years ago. It actually changed into the adjectival use I
| was referring to earlier in the 1800s.
|
| If anything it seems that using myriad as an adjective was
| actually an example of a rule change made to accommodate how
| people were speaking at the time.
| everforward wrote:
| Language is certainly a fascinating thing. The adjective
| form of "legion" always throws me off, like in the
| Anonymous slogan ("we are legion").
|
| Off topic, but now I do kind of wish the Magic: The
| Gathering mechanic was named "Legion" instead of "Myriad".
| lagniappe wrote:
| Also, another common one I see more these days is "it's" where it
| should be "its".
|
| If you can not substitute a usage of "it's" for "it has", "it
| was", or "it is", then you meant to say "its".
|
| It is hard to even be angry about it, I think the language should
| be changed so that any instances of "its" -> "it's" to eliminate
| the exception.
| cdrini wrote:
| Strong agree. As a kid, I remember I'd have to pause for like
| 5s every time I wrote "it's" or "its" to try to remember what
| was correct. And it doesn't help that what I'd usually remember
| is "well apostrophe s denotes possession usually, so surely
| apostrophe s denotes possession here as well". But alas not. I
| think always having the apostrophe makes way more sense.
|
| (Nowadays I just don't double check it and it's basically a
| cointoss if I get it right or not :P)
| bitwize wrote:
| Say that you have i-t followed by apostrophe s,
| now what does that mean? You would not use "it's"
| in this case! As a possessive It's a
| contraction What's a contraction? Well,
| it's the shortening of a word or group of words by
| omission of a sound or letter.
|
| -- "Weird Al" Yankovic, "Word Crimes"
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Gv0H-vPoDc
| Supernaut wrote:
| In certain academic circles, it's been popular for several
| decades now to exhibit indifference to the general decline in
| observance of rules such as this. I find that attitude very
| regrettable. I can't be the only person who has found
| themselves having to repeatedly re-read a passage of text to
| discern its meaning, because the author is ignorant of, or
| indifferent to the use of apostrophes and/or other forms of
| punctuation.
|
| These aren't arbitrary rules, for the most part: they came into
| existence to assist with reading comprehension. The clarity of
| expression afforded by modern English is a great gift, and I
| strongly believe that allowing it to degenerate by abandoning
| these (very simple!) rules will serve only to make written
| English less expressive and more opaque.
| bitwize wrote:
| My wife still fumes that they don't make kids type two spaces
| after sentence-terminal punctuation anymore. And she still
| hasn't processed that periods at the end of sentences are, in
| certain contexts, considered inappropriately arrogant and to
| be avoided.
| int_19h wrote:
| I can see how "unnecessary" periods could be considered
| excessively formal in some contexts like texting, but ...
| arrogant?
| bitwize wrote:
| Yeah, apparently it makes you come off as a know-it-all
| in texting or DMing,and is therefore considered rude.
| int_19h wrote:
| FWIW I think that anyone who seriously believes this
| needs to be told to just go fuck themselves, so if they
| choose to treat such style as "rude" and get offended,
| perhaps it's for the best after all.
| int_19h wrote:
| This particular case is probably not the best example,
| though, given that the lack of apostrophe for "its" is
| inconsistent with its use for possessive case for regular
| nouns in the same circumstances. If we really wanted to
| maximize readability, we'd use apostrophe for possession
| everywhere (including "he's" for "his") and use something
| else entirely to denote the contraction of "is" and "has" -
| preferably two different markers since these can also be
| ambiguous in many cases. Or vice versa, use apostrophe for
| contraction and e.g. hyphen for possessive: "it's" vs "it-s"
| etc.
| pflenker wrote:
| I approve this as it acknowledges the fact that language is not
| static. Next up, in my opinion, will be the _Deppenleerzeichen_,
| the idiot space, between two nouns. This space has rapidly gained
| in usage thanks to auto correct - it's easier to use auto correct
| if you add a space after every noun.
|
| Given how the apostrophe thing is received I expect no less than
| riots and burning tires in the streets once that one is
| officially allowed.
| allemagne wrote:
| This makes me really curious how quickly German has actually
| evolved over time.
|
| My assumptions would be entirely informed from extrapolating from
| historical context and not knowing anything about German.
|
| So there was probably a lot of linguistic diversity before
| unification in 1870, then there would have been a standardization
| effort started by Bismarck (favoring the dialect predominantly
| spoken in Prussia) which would carry through WW1, would be
| relaxed during the Weimar republic, would intensify (or turn into
| something bizarre and Orwellian) in the Nazi era, and then a
| slight divergence between East and West Germany in the Cold War.
|
| Under this, my rough hypothesis would be that German has actually
| changed a lot less in the post-WW2 era, especially since the 90s,
| than it would have in the period before.
|
| Is this roughly how things shook out? I'd be really interested
| where this is completely wrong.
| leipert wrote:
| Oh, big official orthographic reforms happened in 1944 and then
| in 1996. So that happened in the 90s, and a few minor revisions
| after that.
|
| A lot of English vocabulary (technology but also every day
| life) had an influence on German, especially in Eastern Germany
| post-reunion. An example: Most people born after 1990 probably
| invite you to a Geburtstagsparty instead of a Geburtstagsfeier.
|
| Compared to the after-war generations, hyper-local dialects
| probably faded out as bit as well. If I talk to people from my
| grandparents generation, there were sometimes difference in
| terms even though people just lived a few villages apart.
|
| Biggest development I am happy about, is that the capital Ss is
| probably becoming official during my life time.
| Wytwwww wrote:
| > favoring the dialect predominantly spoken in Prussia
|
| Was it though? Historically Low German was spoken in
| Brandenburg (and the rest of pre 1800s Kingdom of Prussia).
| Standard German is a High German language closely related to
| the dialects in Saxony/Thuringia etc. (thanks to Luther) and
| predates Prussia's status as a major German power by a few
| centuries or so.
|
| Paradoxically in the 1600s and 1700s Prussia invested a lot of
| effort into replacing in replacing its local dialects with
| Standard German (which by modern standards was effectively an
| entirely foreign language to most people living there. I think
| technically even Dutch/Flemish might be closer to Standard
| German than Eastern Low German was).
|
| Austrians, Bavarians etc. didn't really need to do the same
| since it was already much easier for them to 'learn' Standard
| German if they needed to (and of course its association with
| Protestantism played a role initially)
|
| It's a bit like if Scotland replaced Scots with Shakespearean
| English, then proceeded to takeover the rest of Britain and
| moved its capital to Edinburgh.
| Tabular-Iceberg wrote:
| Fine, but using a ` or ' instead of a ' or ' should be an
| arrestable offense.
| Tepix wrote:
| It's not fine. It's still a disgrace. But i agree, using
| accents or backticks is so much worse!
| rob74 wrote:
| > _The new edition of the Council for German Orthography's style
| guide [...] lists "Eva's Blumenladen" (Eva's Flower Shop) and
| "Peter's Taverne" (Peter's Tavern) as usable alternatives, though
| "Eva's Brille" ("Eva's glasses") remains incorrect._
|
| So they didn't actually simplify it - they made it more
| complicated? But my single largest pet peeve with the original
| reform is that they "outlawed" the use of the English plural form
| for loan words like "Party". In German, you are now supposed to
| write "Partys", "Parties" is incorrect. Bet they didn't change
| that... or did they?
| ars wrote:
| Can you explain what's different about Glasses vs Tavern, where
| it's allowed in one and not the other?
| Wytwwww wrote:
| Supposedly names of businesses and/or public signs are
| required to comply with certain rules? Which isn't surprising
| considering the love Germans have for pointless
| bureaucracy...
|
| So I guess this is some sort of a (certainly not arbitrary)
| compromise to appease both sides.
| cdumler wrote:
| 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 (ie,
| The password is "123456".) * Companies switched from being
| singular plurals ("Google is deprecating another product.") to
| plural singulars ("Google are deprecating another product.")
| * Moving away from verbed nouns ("Google it") to multipart verbs
| ("search it up"). * Double infinitives ("to try to eat")
| getting changed to an infinitive and conjunction ("to try and
| eat").
|
| One thing I am very said about is just how lack luster both of my
| kid's hand writing is. My eldest is in high-school and her hand
| writing is horrible. Partly because she has little use for long-
| form writing (forget cursive) and because they rely on the spell
| checker.
| mostlysimilar wrote:
| > * Companies switched from being singular plurals ("Google is
| deprecating another product.") to plural singulars ("Google are
| deprecating another product.")
|
| > * Moving away from verbed nouns ("Google it") to multipart
| verbs ("search it up").
|
| Resist! Google is trying to get you to stop Googling things,
| but we don't have to listen to the corporate overlords.
| nmeofthestate wrote:
| I think organisations (companies, teams) being
| singular/plural differs depending on what country you're in,
| so perhaps this is a bleeding across of conventions due to
| globalisation.
| jasonpeacock wrote:
| 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
| nmeofthestate wrote:
| You're right - that has been around for a long long time. But
| I feel like I've seen a general increase in its usage that
| can make writing more ambiguous to parse. Like we already
| know the gender of someone being written about in a sentence,
| but they become referred to as "they" at random - it's a
| subtle effect. I'm talking about examples unrelated to
| "gender stuff" but perhaps that's what's made the usage more
| popular among younger writers.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| Maybe young (and/or non-sexist) writers just don't care or
| aren't obsessed with knowing and explicitly talking about
| someone's gender, when it has nothing to do with the
| message.
| int_19h wrote:
| I just find it annoying that English is almost entirely
| gender neutral except for pronouns. It feels like a weird
| and unnecessary special case (I really don't need to be
| telling everyone what I believe their gender to be every
| time I address them!), so getting rid of that makes the
| language more consistent and uniform overall.
|
| I just wish it didn't conflate singular and plural. But
| the convenience of broadening an existing pattern rather
| than inventing a completely new one still wins in the
| end.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| German seems even more obsessed with gender than English,
| and the exceptions (der Junge -vs- das Madchen) seem to
| reveal its underlying assumptions and disrespect for
| reality in the ways it doesn't align with natural or
| biological gender, like refusing to assign gender to
| young females while imposing manhood on young boys, and
| bizarrely insisting on assigning arbitrary gender to
| inanimate objects.
|
| Gendered pronouns and nouns are just a bunch of useless
| sexist baggage and linguistic friction that make
| languages much harder to learn, and uselessly complex,
| with more trivial arbitrary details to memorize or get
| wrong.
|
| But all those gender-critical sex-obsessed people who
| make a big deal out of getting performatively offended
| and pretending to be confused by neutral pronouns,
| angrily insisting that every word possible explicitly
| defines a gender, are just weird.
|
| The person doth protest too much, methinks.
| int_19h wrote:
| German has grammatic gender for all nouns, so it is
| consistent in that regard, at least. I also don't like
| novel ungendered forms for languages like Spanish
| ("latinx" etc) for the same reason - they stick out like
| a sore thumb because they don't fit the overall feel of
| the language where gender is already a pervasive concept.
| It's kinda like taking a statically typed language and
| introducing completely new syntax to omit the type in one
| very specific case, but not all the others.
|
| But English nouns are already ungendered with very few
| exceptions. Pronouns are also all ungendered except third
| person singular, so there's a much stronger case here for
| eliminating the exception in contexts where it really
| doesn't contribute anything useful.
|
| As far as getting offended, I think one has to
| distinguish between the person getting misgendered being
| offended themselves vs people getting offended "on
| behalf" of others (who might actually be rather offended
| at such misrepresentation of what they actually want).
| E.g. with Spanish it's far more common for native English
| speakers to be adamant about "-x", while many native
| Spanish speakers actively dislike it.
| nmeofthestate wrote:
| Good point - maybe you're right and just I'm a gender-
| obsessed sexist. Thanks.
| xdennis wrote:
| > people suddenly realizing they were already recognizing
| genderless people without knowing it ;)
|
| Not true. It was used in the past to refer to an unknown
| person. I.e. "When a candidate arrives given them the test."
| You don't know what sex the candidate is before he arrives
| and instead of saying "he or she" you say "they".
|
| But nowadays people use it as a superclass of he and she: "I
| asked my boss for a raise but they refused". It doesn't make
| any sense. You know very well what sex your boss is, but
| "they" is used for virtue signaling. It's a way of saying "I
| know my boss is a man, but I'm going to use they because a
| woman could do just a good a job and he, sorry, they does."
| jasonpeacock wrote:
| Your sentence is the perfect example for proper use of
| "they", per the wikipedia article "It typically occurs with
| an indeterminate antecedent" - "boss" is non-gendered and
| so "they" is grammatically correct.
|
| There's no virtue signalling, you're reading too much into
| it.
| kayodelycaon wrote:
| > You know very well what sex your boss is, but "they" is
| used for virtue signaling.
|
| I doubt it's virtue signaling. I'll use they to refer to
| the position not the person. Sometimes it's deliberate
| obscuration. Other times it's a form of laziness. I don't
| have to think about which pronoun to use if I just use the
| generic one.
|
| In my case, once I got used to seeing people as people
| first instead of their gender, it's been easy to slip up on
| the pronoun.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| No, it is used to signal the person's gender doesn't
| matter. Being angry about other people not fixating on
| gender by demanding everyone always explicitly define it
| with every pronoun is used as sexism signaling, which is
| what you're doing.
|
| You don't know why other people choose to use the words
| they do, yet you presume the worst and accuse people of
| being insincere and lacking virtue despite (and because of)
| their polite behavior, regardless of their true beliefs,
| when it's actually none of your business to police and
| judge their grammar.
|
| I'd rather work with someone who purposefully signals they
| have virtue than someone who purposefully signals they're a
| sexist asshole, any day.
| int_19h wrote:
| I do know what sex my boss is, but why should I be forced
| to restate it every time I reference them in a
| conversation? It feels rather less polite to the _speaker_
| to impose that need on them.
| ghayes wrote:
| Is "search it up" much different from a similar phrase "search
| for it"? The structure of the original quote is "imperative
| verb, direct object, adverb" but I wouldn't call that a change
| in grammar so much as a change in diction.
| layer8 wrote:
| It's adapted from "look it up". Or maybe more specifically,
| it's "look it up using internet search".
| unsupp0rted wrote:
| I bet her calligraphy sucks too. And is she any good at milking
| a cow?
|
| In 2024 there's no need to feel sad about deprecated (or now
| niche) skills being lackluster.
|
| I'd be more concerned if she couldn't find information
| efficiently when she goes searching for it. That's a skill that
| mustn't be lackluster.
| zargon wrote:
| > Companies switched from being singular plurals ("Google is
| deprecating another product.") to plural singulars ("Google are
| deprecating another product.")
|
| I thought this was just a difference between American and
| British English.
| emaro wrote:
| It's the first time I see a company's name used like that.
| ldoughty wrote:
| Being an old grey beard you probably know these... but for
| others:
|
| > * 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 (ie, The password is
| "123456".)
|
| Prior to movable type printing presses, the British "logical
| quotation" system was the norm for English.
|
| This changed, and is credited to american newspapers, because
| of movable type. I've heard different reasoning (from being
| less likely to break, or to looking cleaner), but both point to
| printers. Even the alternate name for this quotation style is
| "typesetters quotation." <== the period inside the quote to end
| that sentence!
|
| Being a form of mass media, this meant that a lot of mass
| produced works now 'promoted' by proxy this typesetters
| quotation style.
|
| Source for some more info on the above:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quotation_marks_in_English
|
| > * Moving away from verbed nouns ("Google it") to multipart
| verbs ("search it up").
|
| This is purely branding. In the US, if people say "Google it",
| it creates a synonym between "Google" and "Search", which hurts
| cases for Google in defending their brand... If it gets too
| weak, then you or I could make a "Google Booster" company,
| which focuses on improving search engine rankings in general --
| not just Google, and with no direct business relation with
| Google
|
| See: Kleenex, Band-aid, ChapStick, Crock-pot, Jacuzzi
| OJFord wrote:
| > Double infinitives ("to try to eat") getting changed to an
| infinitive and conjunction ("to try and eat").
|
| Or worse, 'to try eat', 'to go get', etc.
|
| It's very American to my ear, but it's certainly invading.
|
| Another corruption triple like that is to do something
| 'accidentally' / 'by accident' / 'on accident'.
| int_19h wrote:
| "go" + verb is a specific idiom, but I can't say that "try
| eat" is common or widely accepted as correct in American
| English.
| cdrini wrote:
| I love to see language evolve like this! Dictionaries and grammar
| rules are not prescriptive, they follow what/how people speak,
| not the other way around. They do influence in the opposite
| direction as well, as a bit of a normalizing/consolidating force.
| I feel like for the last few decades (at least) we've treated
| dictionaries like gospel, with very strict, almost mathematical
| definitions of "correct". I think giving a bit of freedom to
| allow new words/etc to develop naturally, like they have since
| the dawn of human language, is quite nice! I.e. Make fetch
| happen!
| ghayes wrote:
| Just to clarify, I think you have the terms reversed.
| Descriptivism is, as you say, describing a language from its
| everyday usage. Prescriptivism is when you follow a rules body
| or dictionary to say what is "correct."
| cdrini wrote:
| Darn thank you for the correction! I forgot a "not" in there.
| Fixed!
| sigmoid10 wrote:
| tru dat! Language be evolvin like craZy n we shuld just roll
| wit it! Dictiunarys try to tell us wut 2 do but we aint gotta
| lissen! Its lyk, who needz rulez when we can make up wordz as
| we go, amirite? Letz just keep makin fetch happen!!!
| cdrini wrote:
| Hahaha within reason!! I want to see eg authors just
| introduce new words in books, like Shakespeare. New words
| shouldn't generally make the language less internally
| consistent (goodness knows English has enough of a problem
| with that as it is!). I mean new words like... "He was a
| carrapticious old fellow. Always alert, and, despite his old
| age, had the mischievous sparkling eyes of a boy who has just
| told a bad joke".
| sigmoid10 wrote:
| But who's to say which new words are "acceptable" and which
| aren't? Of course if you ask old people they will give
| these Shakespearean answers, but they are not the ones
| defining the future of a language. It's the young
| generation. And they have a very different approach to
| creating new words. Why should their new words be worth
| less? And the example in the original post is actually the
| worst kind according to your definition, because it makes
| the language less consistent.
| cdrini wrote:
| I think the people decide; if folks like a certain word,
| they'll start using it, creating traction. A natural
| selection of words of sorts. Then the dictionaries, being
| non-prescriptive, will have to add those words since
| they're needed to understand common parlance.
|
| And completely agree about young generations, I've
| actually been super pleased at how many new words gen z
| is creating! I feel like the previous few generations
| created way fewer words. I disagree with things like
| introducing inconsistent spellings like "lyk" in terms of
| adopting that as a standard, because it just makes the
| language a headache to learn. But creating words for
| things that don't have existing words (like carrapticious
| in my other example), or even creating new sort of word
| variations which kind of grow/evolve into their own words
| (like rizz) seem like a nice expressive way of extending
| language. (I'm a bit more mixed on the value of the
| latter, though).
| umanwizard wrote:
| Language is a social and cultural phenomenon. That doesn't
| mean there are no rules. It means that the rules are
| implicitly decided collectively by the community of speakers
| rather than by a centralized body.
| sigmoid10 wrote:
| If you spend enough time among the right communities,
| you'll find tons of people speaking that way or any other
| way. Especially among the uneducated demographics. The very
| same ones that created this new rule in the original
| article (hence the name "idiot's" apostrophe). Now should
| we listen to them or not? I see highly conflicting
| statements here.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| Ha, from the picture in the article I thought they were talking
| specifically about the backtick as an apostrophe. I could totally
| call that the idiot's apostrophe, but in a completely different
| context than what the Germans are talking about.
| qwertox wrote:
| > [...] though "Eva's Brille" ("Eva's glasses") remains
| incorrect.
|
| Where would be the fun if there's no exception to the rule in the
| German language.
| Etheryte wrote:
| It's like German humor, it's no laughing matter.
| wolframhempel wrote:
| 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 - and controlling it is an important aspect of exercising
| control.
| Eddy_Viscosity2 wrote:
| Indeed, dictionaries and governments are just writing down
| what's already happening in the language.
|
| In a way language is one of the only truly democratic
| institutions. We all vote for new words and new pronunciations
| by using them or not using them. The collective action of all
| these choices is the language.
| duped wrote:
| That's not always accurate, many of these government bodies
| _fight_ the evolution of the vernacular and suppress dialects
| or loanwords.
| metaphor wrote:
| This.
|
| For example, in the Mariana Islands, there are two
| independent othography committees that have been low-key
| duking it out over an indigenous language with less than
| 50k native speakers; see these brief highlights[1; p. 11
| onward] from a recognized scholar of the language for a
| small sampling.
|
| In the CNMI, the language is routinely spoken (i.e. English
| is a second language in most households) and the CNMI's
| othography committee has taken a conservative approach,
| focusing on simple written rules that capture sound as
| spoken, and biasing its orthography towards serving as an
| optimal language preservation mechanism...which makes
| objective sense given its target population is
| overwhelmingly fluent.
|
| In Guam, however, the spoken language was nearing
| generational extinction largely driven by American colonial
| influence not dissimilar to the going concern of native
| Hawaiians. Ironically, Guam's better funded orthography
| committee has taken a much more liberal approach in
| establishing new written rules and spellings (e.g.
| _CHamoru_ is the official spelling of the language /people
| written into law as of 2017; yes, the letter _CH_ is now
| entirely capitalized in a proper noun; previously _Chamoru_
| , as opposed to the prevailing and historically consistent
| _Chamorro_ in the CNMI).
|
| There's also been a recent resurgence of language adoption
| by the native youth cohort on Guam largely motivated by
| grassroots sociopolitical identity movement. This hipster
| generation has taken it upon themselves to replace an ever
| growing number of established words adopted during colonial
| rule hundreds of years ago with all but forgotten words of
| the ancient tongue...which I suppose is fair game as
| language evolution goes, but it's gotten to a point of
| irony where these changes are throwing off the elder
| native-speaking generation responsible for passing on the
| language to their progeny, e.g. _family_ (English) -- >
| _familia_ (Spanish adopted) -- > _manggafa_ (antiquated is
| the new hip). In contrast, no such shift in zeitgeist is
| happening in the CNMI.
|
| [1] https://people.ucsc.edu/~schung/orthog_differences.pdf#
| page=...
| schroeding wrote:
| Eh, I wouldn't agree with that. In Germany, we had multiple
| top-down orthographic reforms in the past (e.g.
| Rechtschreibreform 1996, had many many significant, brand-new
| changes to make spelling and speaking more consistent) which
| were pretty forced, i.e. was not organic at all. I'm not
| saying it was bad, I like the current state of the German
| language - but it was not organic or democratic. Germanys
| equivalent to The Daily Mail even had an entire campaign
| against it with stickers and all.
|
| And there is no true way to "vote with your feet" if you get
| punished for violating the official orthography.
|
| Not to mention other sources of non-organic language change,
| like e.g. suppressing dia- or sociolects, but I also don't
| want to delve (hehe) too far. :P
| nobody9999 wrote:
| >And there is no true way to "vote with your feet" if you
| get punished for violating the official orthography.
|
| Ich hat das nicht verstanden. Ich kann mit meinem fusse
| wahlen.
|
| Wie konnte ich fur schlecte Deutsch bestraft werden? Ich
| wohne nicht in Deutschland.
|
| Und ja, meinem Deutsch ist sehr schlecht. Das stimmt.
| Kommen sie damit klar.
|
| Edit: Fixed (without really improving) my terrible german.
| int_19h wrote:
| Nation-states generally tend to be hostile towards dialects
| historically because they are seen as disruptive to
| "national unity", and in more extreme cases, as latent
| separatism. And it feels like, because larger nation-states
| usually have more history of separatism (having forcibly
| assimilated more distinct local cultures), they also tend
| to be more touchy about that.
| majewsky wrote:
| As a German, I don't think this applies to Germany all
| that much. For example, multiple German states have
| enshrined in their constitutions a specific protection
| for several minority languages (mostly Germanic languages
| like Low German or Danish, but also the Slavic language
| of Sorbian that's native to Brandenburg and Saxony). If
| anything, the state and county governments are working to
| preserve those local varieties.
| int_19h wrote:
| Things are generally better today than they used to be in
| most places, but historically Germany did plenty of that
| (and I don't just mean the Nazis!), and that kind of
| history has very long term effects even once policy
| changes.
| schroeding wrote:
| This is true now - it definitely wasn't in the past,
| especially until the 80s. My mother was still beaten (!)
| as a child by her teacher in Munich when she spoke too
| Bavarian. Eradication of dialect was the goal at the
| time, Hochdeutsch the only thing acceptable.
|
| (But the reason was people thinking it's a
| "Bildungshindernis", a roadblock in the pursuit of
| knowledge, like if people speaking dialect were mentally
| challenged - not national unity)
| int_19h wrote:
| Sometimes one is really just a shibboleth for the other.
| I grew up in Russia, and my native Southern Russian
| dialect was similarly derided as "uneducated peasant
| speech" by some schoolteachers, with a similar subtext -
| that, ironically, in an area where that dialect is
| predominant. But then you see the same argument applied
| to Ukrainian and Belarusian (that share some of the
| distinctive features) and realize that it's not _just_
| about being a "roadblock in pursuit of knowledge", even
| if that is used as a convenient justification that people
| might even genuinely believe in themselves when they use
| it - because they, in turn, were culturally conditioned
| to accept it as valid. It doesn't really make much sense
| as a reason when you think about it objectively, though.
| moffkalast wrote:
| Language is power,
|
| France is bacon.
| sweezyjeezy wrote:
| France has a mechanism to try to stop this: the Academie
| Francaise [1] that publishes the official French dictionary.
| Rather than simply recording language as its used, they do
| actively try to steer it. They're most well known for trying to
| suppress anglicisms, e.g. in the early 2000s they pushed
| 'courriel' instead of 'email'. That one did not work out -
| email is much more common, and finally entered the dictionary
| in 2009 (to this day labelled 'anglicism' and discouraged over
| 'mel').
|
| FWIW the German equivalent is much less prescriptive, it only
| weighs in on grammar / punctuation.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acad%C3%A9mie_Fran%C3%A7aise
| BitwiseFool wrote:
| My absolute favorite example of this is the suppression of
| "podcast" in favor of the far more romantic "audio a la
| demande".
| lcouturi wrote:
| 'Courriel' was coined by French Canadian translator Andre
| Clas, not by the Academie Francaise. The Office quebecois de
| la langue francaise successfully promoted its usage in Quebec
| in the 90s and the Academie Francaise unsuccessfully tried to
| do the same in France.
|
| 'Courriel' is still commonly used by French Canadians, but
| indeed it was never widely adopted by France. As a French
| Canadian, I usually use 'courriel", though the anglicism
| 'e-mail' is also quite commonly used. Can't say I've ever
| seen anyone use 'mel', tho.
| diego_moita wrote:
| Well, communication needs standards.
|
| As much as we need someone to define what is http, TCP/IP or
| Posix we also need someone to define what is English, Spanish
| or any language.
|
| If you don't believe it then try to understand whatever
| language a Venezuelan or Dominican speaks. That blabber is
| anything but Spanish.
| sweezyjeezy wrote:
| But what are you suggesting? It wouldn't be better if
| Venezuela had its language dictated by another country (e.g.
| Spain) - that would just be oppressive.
| diego_moita wrote:
| Well, ASALE[1] (Association of Academies of Spanish
| Language) is already a cross-national body that negotiates
| these rules among several countries.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Association_of_Academies_
| of_th...
| Wytwwww wrote:
| > As much as we need someone to define what is http, TCP/IP
| or Posix we also need someone
|
| Why? Humans are almost infinitely more adaptable and capable
| of dynamically changing their behaviour compared to computer
| programs. Learning to understand/speak a new pseudo dialect
| of your native language isn't particularly hard. Millions of
| people do that near effortlessly on a daily basis (especially
| in many German speaking areas).
| oersted wrote:
| This has historically been the philosophy of English linguists,
| but for many languages (Spanish, French, German...) there is a
| central institution that does indeed decide what is officially
| correct. Their decisions are taken seriously and are
| intentionally propagated anywhere where language is used in a
| somewhat official context (not just in public institutions).
|
| True they adapt the standard over time following common usage,
| but the standard is the primary source of truth and many things
| are decided unilaterally regardless of common usage.
| SSJPython wrote:
| > This has historically been the philosophy of English
| linguists, but for many languages (Spanish, French,
| German...) there is a central institution that does indeed
| decide what is officially correct. Their decisions are taken
| seriously and intentionally propagated anywhere where
| language is used in a somewhat official context (not just in
| public institutions).
|
| This sounds very similar to the common law vs. civil law
| traditions as well. I wonder if there's a connection between
| linguistics and legal systems.
| marcellus23 wrote:
| > This has historically been the philosophy of English
| linguists
|
| It's not unique to English linguists, it's a tenet of modern
| linguistics in general. A language is defined by the way
| people actually speak. If that's influenced by a central
| organization, fine, but that does not contradict
| descriptivism at all. Someone studying a language should
| always study the way the language is spoken by real people,
| using prescriptivist sources as supplementary sources of
| information where needed.
| oersted wrote:
| I don't disagree, it is certainly not unique to English,
| and these central institutions do largely have a
| descriptivist attitude (although the French are known to be
| rather purist ;) ).
|
| But there is a practical difference: textbooks and
| dictionaries in English have traditionally come from
| distributed institutions, which are eminent but none of
| them claims to be official, whereas for example in Spanish
| they all originate from or closely follow the standards of
| the Real Academia.
|
| Sometimes unified standards have been artificially created,
| like for Basque or Mandarin, and in those cases
| prescriptivism is more dominant.
| fy20 wrote:
| This is especially important for smaller languages, as
| otherwise the effect of globalisation means that by-default
| they would just use the foreign (typically English) word.
| These institutions are responsible for maintaining the
| culture of the language.
|
| For example in Lithuanian, an "influencer" is colloquially
| called "influenceris". But in Lithuanian "influence"
| translates to "itakos", so it isn't anywhere close to
| correct.
|
| The terms "itakdarys" (influence maker) or "nuomones
| formuotojas" (opinion shaper) would be a more Lithuanian
| version, as they are based on existing Lithuanian words.
| However in this case "influenceris" rolls off the tounge a
| lot easier, so maybe it is acceptable to be used.
|
| The purpose of these institutes is to decide which is the
| correct word to use.
| jrootabega wrote:
| Maintaining correctness of language is not inherently a
| limitation of freedom. You are free to be incorrect in a free
| society. No one is entitled to respect for being incorrect in a
| free society. It IS possible to abuse authority over language
| to exert unfair control, but they are not always the same
| thing.
| criddell wrote:
| Lots of people try to police English as well. It wasn't that
| long ago whenever any use of "begs the question" to mean
| "raises the question" would get plenty of reaction from the
| prescriptivists. Fortunately, that war seems to have ended.
| surfingdino wrote:
| It won't make German jokes any funnier.
| btbuildem wrote:
| Ha. "greengrocer's apostrophe" is a very polite way of referring
| to those who put an apostrophe before every trailing "s".
| mppm wrote:
| For those interested, I highly recommend "The Unfolding of
| Language" by Guy Deutscher, in which he describes how languages
| evolve over time, to the great annoyance of purists, but without
| either losing or gaining sophistication in the long run. It's a
| very entertaining read and has considerably reduced my irritation
| at "incorrect" use of language.
| __loam wrote:
| On top of this I recommend languagejones on YouTube. He's a
| linguistics PhD that gets into things like how African American
| Vernacular English is actually more complex than regular
| English, intentionally obfuscated from white English, and has
| fast moving slang to stay ahead of adoption of the slang into
| the wider culture. It's pretty fascinating stuff and he does a
| lot to show how thinking some of this stuff is incorrect is
| actually just ignorance.
| sltkr wrote:
| For extra irony in this context: Deutscher means German in
| German.
| crazygringo wrote:
| 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",
| rather than the apostrophe "invading" German.
|
| Like, if I go to a Sausage Haus, I'm not exactly worrying about
| "Haus" creeping into English to replace "House". Nor would I ever
| call it the "idiot's house" because that would be crazy insulting
| and perjorative.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob%27s
| eleveriven wrote:
| You're onto something interesting here! The possessive style.
| saghm wrote:
| > 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 multiple times with different people in my family. There's
| no one named "Uno", it's a number! I try not to be a
| prescriptivist but for whatever reason this bothers me to an
| irrational degree, and I can't understand why nobody else
| notices.
| complianceowl wrote:
| I love Uno's.
| aiforecastthway wrote:
| The establishments are owned by a corporate person named "Uno
| Restaurant Holdings Corporation".
|
| So calling it Uno's isn't inconsistent with how we talk about
| Walmart's stores or Google's website, for example.
| xp84 wrote:
| > 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."
| sgerenser wrote:
| My grandmother would indeed refer to shopping at
| "WalMart's" or "Penney's". Maybe a regional thing (she
| was from central PA)?
| slobiwan wrote:
| Same in Iowa. I grew up talking about going to Penny's
| (as in JC Penny) or Sernett's or Gibson's (local
| department stores).
| burningChrome wrote:
| Midwesterner here.
|
| My family always used "Penny's" to refer to JC Penny.
| They also continued to refer to Macy's as Dayton's for
| years after they had changed their name because the
| locations were all the same, just the name had changed.
|
| Its funny because I too always felt saying "Penny's" was
| a regional thing, but more of Midwestern thing.
| delecti wrote:
| I'm from northern Ohio (Cleveland area) and it's only
| reading this thread that I'm learning/realizing that the
| name "JCPenny" isn't plural or possessive. My family
| always called it "Penny's" too.
| ACow_Adonis wrote:
| The Australian English thing to do is to drop the
| apostrophe, use an optional creative contraction to make
| the phrase even shorter, and thereby turn the entire
| thing into a noun :)
|
| I.e. Maccas vs McDonald's
|
| Of course, the official website
| https://mcdonalds.com.au/about-maccas/maccas-story uses
| an apostrophe which is now making me have the same
| reaction as the Germans :( and makes me think it was run
| through some international filter :p outrageous!
| bonoboTP wrote:
| I've also heard people saying "Aldi's" in the US.
| bradhanson wrote:
| To be honest, even when going to the original Pizzeria Uno
| (or Due) I'll probably still call it "Uno's" 'cause it's a
| weird part of the Chicago dialect. We do the same thing for
| the grocery store Jewel-Osco, calling it "da Jewels"
| complianceowl wrote:
| Fellow Chicagoan here. It's funny you say that. My wife
| calls Jewel-Osco "Jewels" lol. I am just starting to
| realize that not everyone talks this way haha.
| bunderbunder wrote:
| 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 say "JCPenney stock is up by 32 cents
| this week," but you'd also say, "I bought this shirt at
| Penney's."
| saghm wrote:
| My family is all from either New England or New York, so it
| might not just be a Midwestern thing anymore!
| vidanay wrote:
| I've got ten bucks that says you've shopped for groceries
| at "Jewels"
| alistairSH wrote:
| _...it drives me crazy when I hear people refer to Pizzeria
| Uno as "Uno's"_
|
| Pedant Alert! The chain's name is "Uno Pizzeria & Grill".
|
| You're not wrong, but the actual ordering of the name makes
| it less clear to a casual observer that there is no person
| named "Uno".
|
| And the domain the company uses is "unos.com", so at the
| corporate entity has accepted the name.
| saghm wrote:
| > And the domain the company uses is "unos.com", so at the
| corporate entity has accepted the name.
|
| Yeah, I've heard servers there say "welcome to Uno's", so I
| know I've already lost the battle. Like I said, it's not a
| rational annoyance though, so that doesn't make me feel any
| better when I hear it.
| tim333 wrote:
| It also appears in their German website
| https://pizzeriaunoffm.de/ "Uno's Pizza Explore Our Delicious
| Pizza" and USA
| https://restaurants.unos.com/locations/NY/New_York
|
| I don't think there's a particular rule that a number can't
| act as a name like 007's movies. Or that the thing possessing
| has to be a person, eg. England's weather.
| int_19h wrote:
| In Russian, the name of the restaurant did include the final
| "s", but without the apostrophe, so I don't think that's
| consistent.
|
| Note though that in German, "-s" is also a genitive suffix,
| it's just the spelling that's different here.
| iforgotpassword wrote:
| This is gonna sound a little pejorative, but I've seen it at
| barber shops and little stores where my bet would be on
| ignorance rather than intentionally trying to imply anything.
| The guy next door did it too so it must be right.
| locallost wrote:
| They're not trying to seem foreign, it's what happens when a
| foreign culture starts spreading. In that sense McDonald's has
| certainly played its part, but mostly because a lot of people
| use rules like these somewhat subconsciously.
|
| E.g. this
|
| > The Deppenapostroph is not to be confused with the English
| greengrocer's apostrophe, when an apostrophe before an 's' is
| mistakenly used to form the plural of a noun ("a kilo of
| potato's")
|
| This also happens in German these days even though in this
| context it makes almost no sense. And nobody is trying to copy
| McDonald's here.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| 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.
| ASUfool wrote:
| You could be like Doug Hopkins here in Arizona and start a
| firm to buy hauses.
|
| https://www.doughopkins.com/
| kps wrote:
| Belongs to members of your family? Nickname yourself 'Hop',
| and it's Hops' kins'.
| FroshKiller wrote:
| 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
| think people get tripped up in school because they see a
| specific affectation of dropping the S from possessive forms
| of the names of some historical personages, e.g. "in Jesus'
| name."
| tim333 wrote:
| 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".
| colechristensen wrote:
| 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.
| normie3000 wrote:
| > we just spell it "wrong", likely out of French/Norman
| influence
|
| Could it be that we spell it differently because the word was
| adopted before spelling was standardised in either language?
| chromanoid wrote:
| 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 is a very ugly mix of German and English we call Denglish
| in German.
|
| And there are many "English sounding" things that are not
| English or also a horrible mix up for marketing purposes.
|
| E.g. Handy for smartphone. It doesn't look exotic, but English
| which is usually considered to be something modern.
|
| And then there is a similar concept as the Idiotenapostroph
| which is the Deppenleerzeichen which is a space between
| combined words that are usually and famously not separated by
| space in correct German.
|
| All those things are usually used in amateurish marketing and
| look just like that to the average German grammar enthusiast.
|
| On the other hand especially in many professional fields
| English conquers the professional slang with gusto of the
| participants. A very hilarious take on such Denglish for
| software developers: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=c2V4bOL1jgM
| mikae1 wrote:
| _> 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. Sarskrivning (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.
| chromanoid wrote:
| > Americentric Swedish Android keyboards are terrible
| offenders that happily splits words in two.
|
| This is how language evolves nowadays. :/
| dingnuts wrote:
| 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
| riedel wrote:
| I also split incorrectly German compounds because it
| makes autocomplete simply much more usable. IMHO a soft
| break +backspace key would be needed on the android
| keyboard to make predictions usable in compound
| languages.
| hibbelig wrote:
| It's autocomplete being based on words. It knows computer
| and it knows keyboard and so in English it is trivial to
| type computer keyboard.
|
| In German it also knows Computer and Tastatur, but I
| can't use autocomplete to type Computertastatur.
|
| Actually I just learned I can. Apparently this word is in
| the dictionary. But there are just so many compound
| nouns, it's impossible for them all to be in the
| dictionary.
|
| To make it work in such a language it has to understand
| about constructing compound nouns.
| jhoechtl wrote:
| > E.g. Handy for smartphone
|
| For clarity, we already called them Handy when they were
| phones but not smart.
| chromanoid wrote:
| That's right, and I think Smartphone is actually competing
| with the good old word Handy, at least in the marketing
| department. I guess "Ich suche mein Smartphone." sounds
| somehow too snobbish in most casual contexts.
| majewsky wrote:
| > "Kati's Ecke" (urks)
|
| The worst I ever saw was an advertisement on a bar telling
| prospective patrons about the availability of "snacks's".
| This is so wrong I can't even figure out how many distinct
| errors were made. (And yes, that's an acute accent, not an
| apostrophe.)
| anonCoffee wrote:
| Oh no not the heckin' pejoratives
| anigbrowl wrote:
| One of the annoying things about widespread use of computers has
| been the butchering of apostrophes by 'smart' quotes because
| programmers won't take the time to develop understanding and
| appropriate user interface, eg 1979 -> [open quote]79. Even if
| the user knows it's wrong, getting the computer to use the
| closing quote mark instead of 'correcting' it is a trial.
| eleveriven wrote:
| For many, language is a key part of cultural identity, and
| changes in grammar can feel like a threat to that identity.
| thrownawaysz wrote:
| But we should all bow down to the american cultural imperialism
| because why not
| renewiltord wrote:
| Whether you should or not is irrelevant because you will. No
| imperialism deigns to ask.
| meling wrote:
| > lists "Eva's Blumenladen" (Eva's Flower Shop) and "Peter's
| Taverne" (Peter's Tavern) as usable alternatives, though "Eva's
| Brille" ("Eva's glasses") remains incorrect.
|
| I didn't understand why Eva's Brille is incorrect. Anyone
| understand the difference? Is it only allowed for commercial
| entities?
| p3rls wrote:
| What bothers me is when people confuse ` grave accents with
| apostrophes ', to the grammar gulags with the lot of 'em.
| kps wrote:
| I have seen people use _commas_. Don,t do that.
| ashishb wrote:
| There are only two approaches to languages that the world will
| follow. One is the Chinese approach, where you create a big
| geographical entity that speaks your language. The other is the
| European Laissez-faire approach of respecting a plethora of
| languages with few speakers which is worthless for most
| foreigners to learn, all of your mini languages die and get
| replaced by English. https://ashishb.net/short-stories/prague-
| airport/
| kemiller wrote:
| English takes influence from other languages left and right, but
| there's always someone salty when it goes the other way.
| booleandilemma wrote:
| That dynamism English has is something that makes it such a
| great language, imo.
| bmulholland wrote:
| If the intersection of English and German interests you, this
| essay beautifully captures how the two intermingle:
| https://europeanreviewofbooks.com/beamer-dressman-bodybag/
| NotYourLawyer wrote:
| If y'all don't like the English style, maybe you should have
| tried harder and won WWII.
| thangalin wrote:
| UNICODE and ASCII apostrophes are a bit absurd. For
| KeenQuotes[1], my library to automatically curl straight quotes,
| there's an Apostrophe type that defines variations on how to
| convert a straight apostrophe to a curled one. The main issue is
| that most suggestions are to use ’, which isn't
| semantically correct[2], and at one point Michael Everson noted,
| "the alphabetic property should be restored to U+02BC"[3]. I've
| bucked the x27, U+2019, and rsquo trend with:
| /** No conversion is performed. */ CONVERT_REGULAR( "'",
| "regular" ), /** Apostrophes become MODIFIER LETTER
| APOSTROPHE ({@code ʼ}). */ CONVERT_MODIFIER(
| "ʼ", "modifier" ), /** Apostrophes become
| APOSTROPHE ({@code '}). */ CONVERT_APOS_HEX(
| "'", "hex" ), /** Apostrophes become XML
| APOSTROPHE ({@code '}). */ CONVERT_APOS_ENTITY(
| "'", "entity" );
|
| Thoughts?
|
| [1]: https://whitemagicsoftware.com/keenquotes/
|
| [2]: https://tedclancy.wordpress.com/2015/06/03/which-unicode-
| cha...
|
| [3]: http://www.unicode.org/L2/L1999/n2043.pdf
| crazygringo wrote:
| But Unicode code points aren't supposed to represent semantics,
| they're supposed to represent... well, "abstract characters"
| that are either glyphs or get combined into glyphs, which can
| have multiple (ambiguous) semantic meanings.
|
| That's why there aren't two different period characters to
| represent the end of a sentence vs. a decimal point, or two
| different em dashes where one represents a pause while the
| other comes at the end of dialog to indicate the sentence was
| interrupted (literally the opposite of a pause, it's being cut
| off).
|
| So since the apostrophe and the right single quote are visually
| identical, Unicode stays consistent in recommending that they
| be the same character. The name Unicode gives to a character is
| intended to represent _one_ of its semantic meanings, not _all_
| of them.
|
| (Unicode _does_ have plenty of visually identical characters,
| but they generally belong to totally different languages, like
| the English "o" and the Greek omicron "o".)
| thangalin wrote:
| Thanks for shedding a little more light. Ignoring the
| semantics, in this case, between an apostrophe and a right
| single quote has resulted in many documents containing
| information that can not be parsed unambiguously because we
| have to pick a glyph and doing so with an ambiguously defined
| glyph loses contextual information.
|
| As a side-effect, since GPTs are based on the examples we
| give, they can't encode the proper punctuation for many
| phrases that use British English quotation mark styles,
| making them unable to "curl" the quotation mark properly. For
| example, none can curl this paragraph correctly:
| ''E's got a 'ittle box 'n a big 'un,' she said, 'wit' th'
| 'ittle 'un 'bout 2'x6". An' no, y'ain't cryin' on th' "soap
| box" to me no mo, y'hear. 'Cause it 'tweren't ever a spec o'
| fun!' I says to my frien'.
|
| The other downside to using ' or ' is that most fonts
| treat them as straight quotes, making for "improper" English
| typography when typeset into a book.
| locallost wrote:
| Whether or not this is the correct way to handle it, I don't
| know, but this:
|
| > ...lists "Eva's Blumenladen" (Eva's Flower Shop) and "Peter's
| Taverne" (Peter's Tavern) as usable alternatives, though "Eva's
| Brille" ("Eva's glasses") remains incorrect
|
| ...is as German as it gets. We've made an exception to the rule
| that also has exceptions.
|
| Either accept it as possible or not, this is just plain stupid.
| pseingatl wrote:
| An apostrophe almost landed me in jail.
|
| https://www.linkedin.com/posts/mu7ami_how-an-apostrophe-almo...
| amadeuspagel wrote:
| 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?
| layer8 wrote:
| Or some unkind drink.
| BeretEnjoyer wrote:
| 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.
| shafyy wrote:
| I also see many people using the % or "z. B." (zum Beispiel,
| meaning for example) wrongly in German. Corretly, the % should
| have a space like this: 10 %, not 10% (as it is in English). "z.
| B." also should have a space, but is often used as "z.B.", like
| the "e.g." in English.
|
| However, as mentioned in the article, not clear to me if this is
| in fact because of the English influence or some other reason.
| pronik wrote:
| Sometimes, those rules just don't make any sense. I'm
| especially amused about the euro sign in German which by its
| whole design and intention is supposed to be written before the
| number (EUR50,00), but is instead written behind the number
| with a space included (50,00 EUR). The former looks way better
| and more concise for me, but maybe the reason is just a
| historical one, the Germans have been writing "50 DM" for
| decades after all.
|
| On a different note, it's somewhat amusing that "i.e.", "e.g."
| and "etc." are considered English without any clear alternative
| in the language, while otherwise Latin-loving Germans haven't
| adopted those at all (in fairness, "d.h.", "bspw." and "usw."
| are just fine and I appreciate it when real German is used
| consistently).
| isametry wrote:
| > which by its whole design and intention is supposed to be
| written before the number (EUR50,00)
|
| What makes you think that? The intention of the EUR symbol is
| to be used exactly like other currency notations before it in
| each respective language. In English it's before the number,
| but in many others including German, it is after (50,00 DM).
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euro_sign#Use
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_and_the_euro
| bonoboTP wrote:
| EUR is a unit. Would you write you're ft6 tall or weigh
| lbs170 or that it's degF77 outside?
|
| The weird and exceptional thing is rather that $ is put
| before the number, which is out of step with pronunciation.
| BrandoElFollito wrote:
| Cocorico! France to the rescue!
|
| We anticipated that the British or Americans would try to
| sneakily introduce their words about computers so we appointed a
| group of 70-something-years-old literature experts to create the
| proper words to use for computer stuff.
|
| They came up with novel words that made us the laughingstock of
| the Western world and that nobody wanted to use. The state
| organizations were forced to, so for some time nobody understood
| anybody (this is a slightly romanced version but it was a mess).
|
| Some of the words made sense, most did not. They were published
| by an important organization in France as a dictionary.
|
| We did a lot of great things in computer science - this
| dictionary was not one of them.
| isametry wrote:
| In spirit, this kinda reminds me of the Czech chemical
| nomenclature - large parts of it (including original names for
| many elements) were designed pretty much single-handledly by
| natural scientist Jan Svatopluk Presl.
|
| This was part of the Czech National Revival: a huge movement in
| the 1800s to prevent Czech language and culture to die out
| under the German/Austrian influence. During that time, the
| vocabulary saw a boom of new, original words (including
| ridiculous ones) to combat Germanisms at all cost.
|
| And so to this day, a portion of the Czech periodic table has
| unique naming of elements, completely unrelated to their Latin
| counterparts.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Czech_chemical_nomenclature
| BrandoElFollito wrote:
| I think this is similar in Polish - I believe there are
| different suffixes depending on the level of <something>
| (IIRC this was for some compounds of Fe)
| pronik wrote:
| German is a funny language. To be speaking and writing proper
| German you need to learn all of German, but in addition to that,
| you'd need Latin grammar to build some plurals, English, French
| and to lesser extent Italian and Turkish pronunciation for a ton
| of words, understanding of English idioms, since marketing and
| movies don't bother with translating taglines anymore, and quite
| a bit more. It's especially noticeable when you have little kids
| and have to correct them constantly when they are trying their
| newly acquired reading skills on billboards along the road.
| tim333 wrote:
| Of vague relevance - last week's SMBC comic on English being
| partly of French and German origin https://www.smbc-
| comics.com/comic/arthur
|
| Which as a Brit I found quite interesting - I didn't realise the
| early language of Britain was Common Brittonic before reading
| that. It got displaced by English and it's closest descendant in
| the UK is Welsh.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2024-10-09 23:01 UTC)