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.
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 43 days ago [-]
> the Deppenleerzeichen which is a space between combined words that are usually and famously not separated by space in correct German.
We feel you over here in Sweden. Särskrivning (roughly “word splitting”) is a “problem” far greater than the apostrophes for us. Americentric Swedish Android keyboards are terrible offenders that happily splits words in two.
chromanoid 43 days ago [-]
> Americentric Swedish Android keyboards are terrible offenders that happily splits words in two.
This is how language evolves nowadays. :/
mikae1 42 days ago [-]
Or degrades, depending on how you see it. dagw explains how splitting or not splitting carries meaning[1]. I actually think it's a nice construct.
Yes. Is there ANY way good to type combined words using the default Android keyboard? I keep manually removing spaces, and then the spellchecker of course incorrectly marks the combined word as being incorrect.
dingnuts 43 days ago [-]
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
hibbelig 43 days ago [-]
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.
dagw 42 days ago [-]
The core model seems to have a lot learned behaviour that it applies to all (latin) languages. One is that people sometimes fail to hit space between words and when that happens, in most cases, people actually wanted to insert a space between the two distinct words, and this behaviour has carried over to other languages.
Also In Swedish splitting the words is many cases not incorrect, but just changes the meaning.
For example is Swedish an "English teacher" (Engelsk lärare) would be a teacher that is from England, while an "Englishteacher" is a teacher the teaches the subject English.
So "He is an English teacher" and "He is an Englishteacher" would both be valid sentences in Swedish, but the predictive text model seems to assume you wanted the first one.
bargle0 42 days ago [-]
“He is an English Englishteacher” gives me a chuckle.
riedel 43 days ago [-]
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.
wkat4242 42 days ago [-]
Yeah the same in Dutch. Though we don't really care so much about mixing English customs with Dutch. In Germany the language purity seems to be a much hotter topic. In Holland we're pretty pragmatic about it. If it works, go for it.
Personally I think our "language culture" is overrated and I wouldn't care if Dutch just disappeared completely in favour of English.
guenthert 42 days ago [-]
> It doesn't look exotic, but English which is usually considered to be something modern.
It might have looked 'modern' (or rather progressive) seventy years ago (or thirty years ago in the east); these days using proper German seems rather backward, dated or borderline fascist.
It got pretty absurd over the last decades though. My parents were complaining about the bill they got from Telekom -- why in the world were 'Ferngespräche' listed there as 'long distance calls' in a text otherwise (near) German?
Now, I would love to see more English being used in Germany, particularly in official communication as there are plenty of people here who's first language isn't German. But why not both? It's not that much more work. Denglish however belongs strictly banned into the realm of comedy (recently I've seen a gas station advertizing its "Power Sauger" :))
jhoechtl 43 days ago [-]
> E.g. Handy for smartphone
For clarity, we already called them Handy when they were phones but not smart.
aloe_falsa 42 days ago [-]
As someone who knows English and is learning German, the words "Handy" for smartphone, or "Beamer" for overhead projector, or "Oldtimer" for classic car all sound very out of place. Even hearing "das Baby" for a nursing-age baby (instead of the German "Säugling") sounds a bit weird.
I guess it's different when you grew up with those words and internalized them.
chromanoid 43 days ago [-]
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.
chrisdhoover 42 days ago [-]
A handy means something entirely different in the US
dash2 42 days ago [-]
An English chap once asked a US friend of mine for a cigarette, or as he innocently put it, "Can I bum a fag?"
physicsguy 42 days ago [-]
There was a funny guide circulating a few years ago about "Euro-English" used in the European Union and it's institutions, that was completely incomprehensible to a native speaker.
skissane 39 days ago [-]
> There was a funny guide circulating a few years ago about "Euro-English" used in the European Union and it's institutions, that was completely incomprehensible to a native speaker.
A lot of it is just (1) use of French loanwords to refer to EU-specific concepts (acquis is arguably the most famous), (2) use of genuine but rare English words – for example "subsidiarity", a word few English-speakers know, but the EU loves – but it isn't exclusive to the EU, Catholic theologians love it too (there is a whole section devoted to it in the Catholic Catechism), (3) the kind of common linguistic errors (false cognates, etc) which French speakers (and to a lesser degree, speakers of other EU languages) make when speaking English.
There are also some cases where it is hard to say if what is happening is (1) or (3), for example the use of the word "cabinet" (pronounced the French way) to refer to the office staff of a senior official
majewsky 43 days ago [-]
> "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.)
In English I’m actually ok with it for single letters or abbreviations- “your writing uses a lot of x’s and y’s”, “Can you pack away the CD’s and DVD’s”, but this is a personal quirk and definitely non-standard usage.
saghm 43 days ago [-]
> 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.
bunderbunder 43 days ago [-]
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."
kbrkbr 42 days ago [-]
That in turn sounds a lot like the latin locative case [1], which was a case next to dative, accusative etc. to indicate place.
People call Safeway "Safeway's" all the time. This one kinda drives me crazy.
Fred Meyer is also not "Fred Meyer's" but at least I can see why that would happen.
Then you have Vons, which used to be "Von's Grocery Company." I guess you go in there now and there's just more than one guy named Von in the store.
Ralphs also dropped the apostrophe.
Albertson's is now "Albertsons."
Kinda funny it seems like Americans are dropping the apostrophes. The exact opposite of what the article is talking about.
At least nobody is saying "Let's go to Costco's."
Also in the PNW, everybody called it "Penny's" for as long as I can remember.
lukas099 41 days ago [-]
I’m definitely saying “Costco’s” from now on; that’s hilarious to me.
sheepybloke 41 days ago [-]
I come from Michigan, and have found that the two fastest ways people identify me are 1) calling fizzy soft drinks "pop" and 2) that I add an "s", e.g. King Sooper's or Meijer's.
foldr 42 days ago [-]
Is this not restricted to company names deriving from personal names (or words that are perceived as such), though? For example, would you say “I bought this shirt at Target’s”?
bunderbunder 42 days ago [-]
In general, yeah, but this is sneaking into the area of language where it's all ad-hoc conventions and there aren't actually any reliable rules. I suspect, for example, that there's a sandhi component that helps predict which store names do and do not get the S added.
saghm 43 days ago [-]
My family is all from either New England or New York, so it might not just be a Midwestern thing anymore!
vidanay 43 days ago [-]
I've got ten bucks that says you've shopped for groceries at "Jewels"
aiforecastthway 43 days ago [-]
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 43 days ago [-]
> 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 43 days ago [-]
My grandmother would indeed refer to shopping at “WalMart’s” or “Penney’s”. Maybe a regional thing (she was from central PA)?
mometsi 42 days ago [-]
The stores really were called Penneys (no idiot apostrophe present) until being gradually rebranded in the 70s and 80s.
Penney's was founded by James Cash Penney. The store was his store, that is, it was Penney's store. I think the omission of the apostrophe was kind of artistic license, but I'm only addressing the silliness of adding the "S," with or without an apostrophe, to something that isn't a person's name.
burningChrome 43 days ago [-]
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 43 days ago [-]
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.
xp84 41 days ago [-]
I can understand Penney's or Dayton's since those were people who founded eponymous stores. I suppose we have our answer -- people established a habit of the "S" when that type of naming was so common, and extended it instinctively to all stores even though there was never a Mr. Kmart or a Mr. Circuit City.
Fun tangent: I learned pretty recently that the southern California grocery chain is named after a man with the last name "Ralphs," so it never had an apostrophe and indeed shouldn't have one (in any language).
ACow_Adonis 43 days ago [-]
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 43 days ago [-]
I've also heard people saying "Aldi's" in the US.
slobiwan 43 days ago [-]
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).
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.
saghm 42 days ago [-]
I'd argue this is less akin to calling Casino Royale "007's movie" but rather if you referred to the sequel to the Godfather as "Part II's movie". I suppose this is a bit of a philosophical question of whether the index of something is the same as the thing itself, but I think I fall in the camp that things exist distinct from the way we identify them, and names are just labels rather than some inherent part of the thing itself.
alistairSH 43 days ago [-]
...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 43 days ago [-]
> 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.
bradhanson 43 days ago [-]
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 43 days ago [-]
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.
TinkersW 42 days ago [-]
Uno isn't a number in english though, and you wouldn't capitalize a number, so treating it as a name seems reasonable.
complianceowl 43 days ago [-]
I love Uno's.
colechristensen 43 days ago [-]
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 43 days ago [-]
> 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?
thoroughburro 42 days ago [-]
> If you take away the words brought in by immigrants and invaders there is very little recognizable left.
This is not true at all. Most of the core vocabulary is derived from Old English. We’ve borrowed a ton of vocabulary to expand new concepts, but the core has remained relatively stable.
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 43 days ago [-]
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.
DonHopkins 43 days ago [-]
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.
kps 43 days ago [-]
Belongs to members of your family? Nickname yourself ‘Hop’, and it's Hops' kins'.
FroshKiller 43 days ago [-]
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."
lsaferite 42 days ago [-]
Seeing "Hopkins's" is very weird to me. I was taught that the possessive of a noun ending in "s" just got a trailing apostrophe. Is that no longer the norm?
Edit:
As a partially related aside, I have a friend who's right about the same age as me that's incredulous that I was taught to use "they" as a gender neutral pronoun when the subject's gender was unknown (or you desired not convey a gender) back in the late 80s and early 90s. Maybe it's just a regional difference in teaching or something. He's from the UP of Michigan, I'm from Florida. So maybe the same thing is true with possessive nouns
tim333 42 days ago [-]
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".
bagful 42 days ago [-]
In the former case it is a list of performances characterized by including Anthony Hopkins; in the middle, it is a list of performances belonging to Hopkins. The latter reads incorrectly to me as an American but as a possessive nonetheless.
42 days ago [-]
ASUfool 43 days ago [-]
You could be like Doug Hopkins here in Arizona and start a firm to buy hauses.
In the sausage haus they'll spell it bleu cheese on the menu, and it's there and then that reality starts to fray.
locallost 43 days ago [-]
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.
ygra 42 days ago [-]
It happens with other plural endings too ... the worst I've seen was Zwiebel’n. I'm not entirely sure how that one came into existence.
eleveriven 43 days ago [-]
You're onto something interesting here! The possessive style.
anonCoffee 43 days ago [-]
Oh no not the heckin' pejoratives
psychoslave 43 days ago [-]
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
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 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 "t͡s") 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 æ/ɐ/ɑ 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 θ and ð 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.
Joker_vD 42 days ago [-]
The problem of consonant clusters is a bit overstated IMO. I once saw some English speaker complaining about how difficult it is to pronounce Russian, like take a phrase "на встрече" — there are 4 consonants at the start of that second word, wtf! — even though that cluster is exactly the same as the one in the English phrase "of strength"; this cluster even undergoes essentially the same simplification/reduction in both languages.
But I agree that overly large phonemic inventory is a problem. On the other hand, it seems that languages either have a complex consonant system but a simple vowel system; or a simple consonant system but a complex vowel system; I haven't yet seen a language where both systems are simple (Japanese vowels have tonality, so it's not a simple system IMHO), probably because the words in such a language would have to be quite long.
int_19h 42 days ago [-]
Learned phonotactics matters, though, and many languages distinguish between what's allowed on word or morpheme boundaries vs what's allowed within a single syllable - so even if phonemically it's the same cluster, it can still be difficult to learn to pronounce it correctly in the second case.
There are quite a few languages where both vowel and consonant systems are simple - just look at Polynesian languages such as Māori. The latter's vowel system is 5-vowel, and "long vowels" are phonemically vowel sequences that span moras. But, yes, it does mean that you end up with long words such as "whakararurarutia". That said, it's a rather extreme case, and one can still construct fairly simple but rich consonant systems in practice, because it's basically combinatorics - adding just one more bit of information doubles the domain space! So e.g. if you start with a strict CV consonant system and allow C(l/r)V, that's almost 4x as many contrasting syllables. Make it C(l/r/w/y)V(C) like in Globasa, and even with considerable restrictions on clustering stops etc this is enough for most words to be 3 syllables or less, and for most function words to be 1 syllable.
psychoslave 42 days ago [-]
Yes sure, there are a lot of things were Esperanto is not an ideal of linguistic easy-to-learn and easy-to-use fully-neutral perfection communication mean.
Now, the real success of Esperanto is that it does have an over 1 century international active community that does produce it’s own cultural artifacts, using Esperanto as a communication mean. All that without a bound army to back it at any point, that’s probably an unique feat in human history. Also to make it clear, it was not meant to be a universal language, but an international one.
Personally, I love that projects like Globasa comes to live. On a pragmatic level, large scale adoption is unlikely, but that is the case of any human endeavor. Let’s make sure that grandiloquence result likeliness never inhibit beautiful dreams being pursued.
nicbou 43 days ago [-]
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.
burningChrome 43 days ago [-]
>> 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.
The story I heard about how Rumantsch (~40k L1) became the 4th language of switzerland is that one day toward the middle of last century, after Mussolini said that rumantsch speakers were just a bunch of farmers who didn't know how to speak proper italian, the swiss people essentially said « Esti d'épais à marde ! » by voting to make it official.
Yes but actually the use is still going down, because so many people from those regions are moving to Zürich and larger cities. There are more speakers in Zürich now.
I know some people that talk to there parents in Rumantsch that but most likely wont teach it to their children.
It will survive but its not really thriving either. Other languages is a great way to push against an 'enemy' language, like the revival of Gaulish in Ireland.
But we will get pretty good AI of it since there is so much official documentation in it.
082349872349872 41 days ago [-]
Quebec French has almost 8m speakers, including L1 use in urban agglos, so (pace the simpatics giuvens of https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_n9OPhX6GYw ) it's in a much better position.
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.
colechristensen 43 days ago [-]
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.
gavindean90 43 days ago [-]
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.
jjtheblunt 42 days ago [-]
seems plausible.
JumpCrisscross 43 days ago [-]
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.)
wil421 43 days ago [-]
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.
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)
jcranmer 43 days ago [-]
> 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.
MarkusWandel 43 days ago [-]
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.
neaden 43 days ago [-]
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 43 days ago [-]
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.
gavindean90 43 days ago [-]
There are purists that complain. Importantly, we don’t let them edit the dictionaries.
WalterBright 43 days ago [-]
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 43 days ago [-]
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 43 days ago [-]
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 43 days ago [-]
All non-Greek languages are barbarian, since apparently it sounds like we are saying barbarbar to the ancient Greeks.
AStonesThrow 43 days ago [-]
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.
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
vineyardmike 43 days ago [-]
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.
wil421 42 days ago [-]
My whole comment was a joke. Whoosh. Lots of replies, I should’ve put /s.
eleveriven 43 days ago [-]
While English certainly has thousands of words that came from French, it is far from being a "badly pronounced" version of French.
YawningAngel 43 days ago [-]
It's not a conjugation issue. "Champagne" is letter-for-letter identical in both languages, but pronounced differently for phonotactic reasons
MarkusWandel 43 days ago [-]
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.
dqv 43 days ago [-]
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 43 days ago [-]
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 43 days ago [-]
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.
deng 43 days ago [-]
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 43 days ago [-]
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.
int_19h 43 days ago [-]
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.
makeitdouble 43 days ago [-]
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 43 days ago [-]
> 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 42 days ago [-]
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 42 days ago [-]
> but there's still a chance we're wrong
Of course. But it's not like we know nothing about it.
Sohcahtoa82 43 days ago [-]
> 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.
43 days ago [-]
ktosobcy 43 days ago [-]
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 ;)
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.
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.
speakeron 43 days ago [-]
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.
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.
qingcharles 34 days ago [-]
It's interesting now to see more and more programming languages using an underscore as the thousands separator to allow for easier reading without trying to get into a mess of commas or full-stops as separators.
michaelt 43 days ago [-]
> 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 43 days ago [-]
Imagine either England or the USA accepting to vary their language towards a common standard. I expect strong opposition would stem from pride.
ktosobcy 42 days ago [-]
Judging from how well adopting SI went (is going in the UK?) sadly it seems impossible :(
onlypassingthru 43 days ago [-]
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.
shiroiushi 42 days ago [-]
>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.
As I recall, the American spelling of color and other words like that was actually dictated by a "pompous authority", namely Noah Webster, who wrote the dictionary bearing his name. He wanted to simplify some spellings he saw as overly complicated. I happen to agree with him, but this wasn't because of regular, everyday people in different regions.
martijnarts 43 days ago [-]
For what it's worth, French is also controlled by speakers. The pompous authority is just lagging behind.
seszett 43 days ago [-]
There is not authority for french, it's a myth.
The Académie 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 Québec, but only for Québec.
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.
You do realize that what people actually speak (in France) differs quite a bit from the Académie Française. email vs. courriel for example is a good one, but you'll stand out in most places if you don't know l'argot (slang).
I don't think an English standardization would change much in how people actually speak.
ktosobcy 42 days ago [-]
Well, loanwords is slightly different that completely inconsistent spelling - wouldn't you say?
Imagine some would stick with original "bonjour" (Qubec), other more progressive would simplify to "bojur" and whatnote.
You have the same with "colour" and "color". Or "night" and "nite". From my observatio where you have some language authority there is at least consisten spelling (and english spelling is all over the place)
r00fus 42 days ago [-]
And that's why we have language locale codes:
en_US vs. en_GB
fr_CA vs fr_FR
ktosobcy 41 days ago [-]
Yes, but imagine not having to deal with those ;)
Besides, in case of Spanish the spelling is more uniform. Aforementioned locales are mostly for GUIs and regional wording differences. And the thread started with "unifying english spelling" which is just a mess…
BitwiseFool 43 days ago [-]
I jokingly suggest that, by definition, the only person who uses English properly and speaks without an accent is the King.
anthk 43 days ago [-]
Hence the "Royal Academy of English" -> RAE, as in Real Academia Española.
lenerdenator 43 days ago [-]
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 43 days ago [-]
But the King is basically German. ~
kps 43 days ago [-]
Exeunt, bearing off the dead bodies; after which a peal of ordnance is shot off.
tivert 43 days ago [-]
> 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.
int_19h 43 days ago [-]
"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).
samatman 43 days ago [-]
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 Gāoxióng.
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 43 days ago [-]
It's not the character set that's the problem so much so as the set of phonemes. English just doesn't have the ʂ/ɕ distinction, and no amount of creative spelling choices can fix that. Other things are much more straightforward, tones aside.
makeitdouble 43 days ago [-]
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.
hosh 43 days ago [-]
Pinyin is pretty good at rendering Manderin in a Latin script. Can you elaborate on what you mean by “English-friendly”?
tivert 43 days ago [-]
> 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 43 days ago [-]
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.
shiroiushi 42 days ago [-]
>Wades-Giles is closer to English-friendly, but it has a lot of flaws. It has no notion of intonations.
How could it? English is not a tonal language at all, so how could you possibly represent tonality with Latin characters, in a way that English speakers with no extra training could read such text and pronounce the Chinese word in an acceptable way? I don't think it's possible. It's just like trying to use Japanese characters to represent English names: a LOT is lost in translation, because there's simply no way to represent all English sounds in Japanese, since Japanese has far fewer possible sounds than English.
>It could go the other way if Mandarin is the dominant trade language.
But it's not, English is, like it or not. If you want to communicate with someone in any random country in the world, you have a very good chance of doing so if you speak English, regardless of your or the listener's native language. The same isn't true for Mandarin.
tivert 43 days ago [-]
> 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).
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).
inkyoto 42 days ago [-]
> Apparently the Xinhua decided to render "Trump" as 特朗普/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."
Consider a rather unusual (but real nevertheless) Polish surname: «Brzęczyszczykiewicz». Most native English speakers, who are not well known for their patience with long and unusually looking non-native surnames, will instantly give up and shorten it to a mere «B». The most daring and adventurous ones will persevere and will likely arrive at something akin to «Brenshistishkevich», which is neither correct nor easily pronounceable for an English speaker anyway. The few English speakers who are acquainted with Polish, would render and pronounce «Brzęczyszczykiewicz» as «Bzhenchishchikyevich» which is closer to truth, yet it will confuse everyone else who will stick with «Brenshistishkevich» anyway.
Or consider an Icelandic surname of «Þórðarson». We would have «Thordarson» (as a naïve take) or «Thortharson» (somewhat closer to the actual Icelandic version).
Bonus point: Llanfairpwllgwyngyll, a Welsh surname, with the «colloquial» vocalisation of «Lanfarpwilgwingle» vs «Hlan-fair-pool-gwin-gith» (a more truthful rendition).
In all cases, with Brenshistishkevich, Thordarson and Llanfairpwllgwyngyll, we have arrived at the English equivalent of Te Lang Pu (Trump). In fact, there is no need to look at more extreme cases, it will suffice to consider a simple Vietnamese name of «Huy», which most English speakers will pronounce as «Hughey» whereas it is actually «Hwee» – it is still the case of the English Te Lang Pu.
In the case of Mandarin Chinese, the problem is exacerbated by the fact that the Chinese writing script is logographic and can't encode single consonants (single sounds in general, although there are Chinese characters that encode vowelled words, usually exclamations). Secondly (or firstly, in fact), all Chinese languages have a strict rule of a phoneme having the CV(C) structure (Consonant-Vowel(maybe another Consonant)), which makes the CCVCC (i.e. Trump) compound impossible and is completely against the phonetic rules of the language. And many, very many in fact, Chinese speakers neither know pinyin nor speak English. The same is true for many other non-Chinese languages.
It gets a bit better, e.g., in Japanese that, other than the logographic script, has two syllabaries that make it possible to represent Trump as something probably more like Tu-ru-mpu.
> I used to work with a man who's last name was Cao whose name was mispronounced "Cow" […]
Since you also earlier called out «[…] (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», spelling Cao as Tsao (which is what they do in Taiwan but not in the mainland) is not going help as nearly all English speakers will drop the «t» and pronounce it as «Sao». And, since «ts» is one sound and not two, «Sao» is also the English Te Lang Pu.
SllX 43 days ago [-]
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.
ktosobcy 42 days ago [-]
Dumb and inconsistent spelling is already a source of "annoyance" :P
SllX 42 days ago [-]
Yeah but we in the Anglosphere have this wonderful phrase for people that get too hung up on it: “get over it.”
I honestly don’t care if someone uses “color” or “colour” or makes ghoti jokes at the English language’s expense.
ktosobcy 41 days ago [-]
> Yeah but we in the Anglosphere have this wonderful phrase for people that get too hung up on it: “get over it.”
Unfortunately for the rest of the world outside of your beloved "anglosphere" using wrong spelling results in said "anglosphereian" being utterly butthurt.
Maybe the whole world should adopt universal language with saner spelling and leave english to anglosphere?
SllX 41 days ago [-]
> your beloved
Don’t put words in my mouth.
> Maybe the whole world should adopt universal language with saner spelling and leave english to anglosphere?
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.
shiroiushi 42 days ago [-]
>Just look at the mess of Imperial units in the United States.
The US doesn't use Imperial units; it uses "US Customary" units. They're not the same, though there is some overlap. Imperial units are used in the UK, which is why they're called "imperial" (from "empire"--the British Empire). Imperial inches, for instance, are the same as US inches (2.54cm), but UK/Imperial gallons are quite different from US gallons, which is why the miles-per-gallon ratings for cars are so different between the two countries.
gtk40 43 days ago [-]
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 43 days ago [-]
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.
partiallypro 43 days ago [-]
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.
ktosobcy 42 days ago [-]
Care to explain about "not having slang"?
From my observation adoption of english (and it's slang) is mostly due to "verbal colonialism" - pop culture mixed with "we work in english" spiced with "I'm cool so I'll drop this pointless slang from foreign language"...
scheme271 43 days ago [-]
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.
ktosobcy 42 days ago [-]
> e.g. a chilean spanish speaker won't care what the RAE says
Erm... curious that you brought that up as I lived in Chile for a couple of years and now in Spain. And while I agree that Chilean Spanish is wild it does follow RAE spelling guidelines, or at the very least I haven't seen any obvious deviations. Now there's a lot of modismos ("chilenismos", local words formed usually by borrowing from natives Mapuche in south or Quechua in the north) but they still tend to follow more-or-less spelling. Accent/pronounciation is yet another thing but that doesn't affect spelling all that much. And on top of that there is a lot of "mutilation" of words when using whatsapp (either being in a hurry or being from low social background) but even in even so slightly more formal setting people immediatelly fallback to official spelling.
(Spanish is more gracefull when it comes to spelling as "what you hear you write" and vice versa so maybe the problem is less pronounced)
taylorius 43 days ago [-]
Nah, such a body would surely be the beginning of the end. Anarchy in the UK, including its language!
eastbound 43 days ago [-]
France has the Académie Française. 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 Français.e.s spelling and rather keep the usual “Français(es)”, and suddenly all administrations started the dot-based version.
wkat4242 42 days ago [-]
But which English? American and British English are substantially different. Spelling of many words, expressions, even the way quotation marks and periods are ordered.
I doubt either country will ever accept the other's version.
chimeracoder 43 days ago [-]
> 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 43 days ago [-]
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.
sjm 43 days ago [-]
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.
JPLeRouzic 42 days ago [-]
It seems to me that today's French is not exactly the French of 50 years ago. Orally it does not look so different but when the same people write, the difference is apparent.
All languages evolve through time, but I think that a major factor of evolution was the fact that it was accepted ~20 years ago that it's OK to write phonetically at school. And now we have school teachers that learned that way so it's definitely a standard feature of the current French.
For example the following hilarious reader comment in the economic news website "La Tribune":
"plutot que dire 18 milliares de deficte pour faire les gros titres il serais plus interessant de dire d'ou vient le soit disant deficite . La secu ne serait elle pas victime de paiement de prestations qui ne la concerne pas . qui s'en richie sur son dos ? N y aurit il pas des acteurs economiques qui ne participeraient pas a son financement et par contre lui demanderait des presttions ? c'est cela que lon veut savoir un peut comme les retriates ou le regime generale eponge les déficites qui ne le concerne pas par ce que letat ne finance pas les retaites de la fonction publique a son juste niveau."
1-more 42 days ago [-]
> Now, there are languages for which Globish can be part of an existential threat, but German and French are nowhere close to this.
While it may be accidental, maybe stemming the tide against Franglais will have a large secondary benefit for the minority language speakers of France. If your average native Gallo(e.g.) speaker needs to learn French in order to watch the news, that's one thing. If they then need to learn a bunch of English in order to speak French, well there's even less of a chance that they'll be able to spend a lot of their life speaking Gallo.
IDK maybe it will make no difference for those languages; French will crowd them out regardless of how much English there is in French.
Muromec 43 days ago [-]
Why invent Esperanto if Dutch already exists and is the most reasonable European language to learn.
lolc 43 days ago [-]
Finally a modest proposal to unite the European people.
freeone3000 43 days ago [-]
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
Terr_ 42 days ago [-]
> 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.
EasyMark 43 days ago [-]
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”
fredgrott 43 days ago [-]
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...
talideon 42 days ago [-]
No, English was not formed the same way as creoles are. A creole is a language that develops from a pidgin. That's a process of increasing complexity. English underwent _simplification_ due to significant contact with non-native speakers. That's the opposite process and gets referred to as "creolisation", which happens to languages all the time. Almost all the Romance languages underwent some degree of amount of it. Some pidgins and jargons might've developed along the way and influenced the change, but the key difference with creolisation is that the modern language didn't primarily develop out of these.
makeitdouble 43 days ago [-]
> 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 43 days ago [-]
Mal: "We got work to do, dong ma?"
wolframhempel 43 days ago [-]
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 43 days ago [-]
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 43 days ago [-]
That's not always accurate, many of these government bodies fight the evolution of the vernacular and suppress dialects or loanwords.
metaphor 43 days ago [-]
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) --> manggåfa (antiquated is the new hip). In contrast, no such shift in zeitgeist is happening in the CNMI.
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
int_19h 43 days ago [-]
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 43 days ago [-]
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.
schroeding 43 days ago [-]
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 42 days ago [-]
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.
int_19h 43 days ago [-]
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.
43 days ago [-]
nobody9999 43 days ago [-]
>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.
43 days ago [-]
sweezyjeezy 43 days ago [-]
France has a mechanism to try to stop this: the Académie Française [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 'mél').
FWIW the German equivalent is much less prescriptive, it only weighs in on grammar / punctuation.
My absolute favorite example of this is the suppression of "podcast" in favor of the far more romantic "audio à la demande".
lcouturi 43 days ago [-]
'Courriel' was coined by French Canadian translator André Clas, not by the Académie Française. The Office québécois de la langue française successfully promoted its usage in Quebec in the 90s and the Académie Française 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 'mél', tho.
sweezyjeezy 42 days ago [-]
Yes I don't think they invent words, that really would be bad.
BlindEyeHalo 42 days ago [-]
If you want to maintain mutual intelligibility of a nation you need a standardised set of rules to teach kids at school.
If you just let it "develop organically" without any governing body you get a wide range of dialects that will drift further apart from another and it will be very difficult to read any text that is 50 years old.
oersted 43 days ago [-]
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.
fy20 43 days ago [-]
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 "įtakos", so it isn't anywhere close to correct.
The terms "įtakdarys" (influence maker) or "nuomonės 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.
marcellus23 43 days ago [-]
> 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 43 days ago [-]
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.
SSJPython 43 days ago [-]
> 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.
jrootabega 43 days ago [-]
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.
keiferski 42 days ago [-]
I think this is a naive view. Language does not develop “organically,” unless your definition of organic includes media corporations, university boards, and hundreds of other institutions which use their wealth to influence society. The idea that individual speakers of a language just independently start using specific words or phrases (or pushing the ideas behind those words) without any input or influence is simply not true.
diego_moita 43 days ago [-]
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.
Wytwwww 43 days ago [-]
> 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).
sweezyjeezy 43 days ago [-]
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 43 days ago [-]
Well, ASALE[1] (Association of Academies of Spanish Language) is already a cross-national body that negotiates these rules among several countries.
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.
moffkalast 43 days ago [-]
Language is power,
France is bacon.
nomilk 43 days ago [-]
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 Ælla, 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!)
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 43 days ago [-]
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)
penteract 43 days ago [-]
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
f33d5173 43 days ago [-]
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 43 days ago [-]
Would the same logic also invalidate ‘waters edge’?
dylan604 43 days ago [-]
> 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
nomilk 42 days ago [-]
Hadn't even considered that. I think that confirms "waters edge" can be grammatically correct. (random example: "as rain falls, flood waters edge closer")
Andrex 43 days ago [-]
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 43 days ago [-]
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.
hcs 42 days ago [-]
Though when it comes up in the book it's clear that it was a mistake (or a cruel joke) in that context.
underlipton 42 days ago [-]
In the book's context. But in the meta-context of why it's in the book, the author's intent is to fool you into thinking it's a mistake, when it actually isn't. Specifically, it's supposed to suggest the technological singularity not being a pot of gold but the death of history (and possibly humanity).
cs702 43 days ago [-]
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]
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.
adamc 43 days ago [-]
Languages change. I'm always amused that we get upset by that, but it's going to keep happening.
xdennis 43 days ago [-]
> 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/casă/chez because common people referred to their house by the word "casa".
wrzuteczka 43 days ago [-]
Weird twist: Slavic languages use words very similar to "domus" for "house", for example, "dom" in Polish or "дом" in Ukrainian.
int_19h 43 days ago [-]
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:
That's дім, not дом, but of course it's "вдома" and "у домі" for reasons.
Wytwwww 43 days ago [-]
Also Ancient Greek, Albanian, Sanskrit, Ancient Iranian etc. Supposedly even "timber" (in English) is somehow derived from the the same root ..
cs702 43 days ago [-]
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."
BrandoElFollito 43 days ago [-]
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 43 days ago [-]
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.
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)
mattmaroon 43 days ago [-]
In America an idiot’s apostrophe is when someone uses it to pluralize words and it too seems to be growing in use.
waterproof 43 days ago [-]
In the article they call that the “greengrocer’s apostrophe” as in “twelve potato’s”.
itronitron 43 days ago [-]
I don't know that I have ever seen that in the wild, but probably only because I refuse to accept that it exists.
pivo 43 days ago [-]
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 43 days ago [-]
> but I couldn't get the clerk at the store to understand what was wrong.
I would have loved to watch that conversation :-)
SoftTalker 43 days ago [-]
Clerk probably had nothing to do with it, could not change it, and didn't care anyway.
ToucanLoucan 43 days ago [-]
> 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 43 days ago [-]
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 43 days ago [-]
> 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 43 days ago [-]
Dad’s Love Tool strikes again
onlypassingthru 43 days ago [-]
Dad's Love Tool is why he's a dad.
nobody9999 43 days ago [-]
>Dad’s Love Tool strikes again
That's what she said!
oneeyedpigeon 43 days ago [-]
I believe the term originated here in the UK, where it's actually pretty common. Although, ironically, greengrocers aren't so much anymore.
automatic6131 43 days ago [-]
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 43 days ago [-]
I literally could care less. If people cant handle this alternative way of communicating, thats there problem.
names_are_hard 43 days ago [-]
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.
automatic6131 42 days ago [-]
I follow a 37 year old Englishman on social media, a native speaker, who uses the word "women" to describe any and all numbers of women. Even his wife, his special women. I follow him purely to witness what other idiosyncrasies he'll inflict on our demotic Anglo-Saxon.
DonHopkins 43 days ago [-]
potatoe's
forinti 43 days ago [-]
I see this a lot in Brazil, and English is not even our language!
phito 43 days ago [-]
French people do make this mistake a lot too.
43 days ago [-]
Tepix 43 days ago [-]
In dutch, it's not even a mistake for certain words ending with vowels.
For example "Photo's".
mppm 43 days ago [-]
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 43 days ago [-]
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 43 days ago [-]
For extra irony in this context: Deutscher means German in German.
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?
maxnoe 43 days ago [-]
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 43 days ago [-]
Oh shoot, I read it as Eva's Glasses, the name of her eyewear shop.
qwertox 43 days ago [-]
That would be "Eva’s Brillenladen".
Semaphor 43 days ago [-]
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 43 days ago [-]
... 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 43 days ago [-]
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.
dirkt 42 days ago [-]
Define "proper usage". You can call it anything you want, but if you call it "Evas Blummenladen", people will wonder why you spelled "Blumen" wrong. Now sometimes people do that in names as a play on words etc., but here it just doesn't make sense.
In the same way, people will wonder why you spelled "Eva's" in "Eva's Blumenladen" wrong, if you spell it that way.
Yes, if enough people start doing a wrong thing, it'll eventually become "right", and I guess in 100 year's we can put apostrophy's where'ever we wa'nt, but currently it still looks odd, and like something that is foreign to German, and imported from English. Because unlike in English, in German this apostrophy doesn't stand for an omitted letter in the genitive singular ending.
cardiffspaceman 43 days ago [-]
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.
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 43 days ago [-]
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 43 days ago [-]
In Germany you need approval for business names.
carlosjobim 42 days ago [-]
Do you really? In other European countries you only need approval for your company name, but are free to use any business name(s) you prefer, as long as they're not trademarked.
croes 43 days ago [-]
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.
oniony 43 days ago [-]
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.
em-bee 42 days ago [-]
that's an interesting theory. it would go along with the contraction of not like in don't and also in is like in that's.
is there any other non-foreign use of ' that is not such a replacement?
randomtoast 43 days ago [-]
‘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)
almostnormal 43 days ago [-]
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 43 days ago [-]
It seems the EU laws for this have changed last year [1], to allow Erdbeermarmelade again.
Phew, that was close. What would we do without our Erdbeermarmelade.
yamazakiwi 43 days ago [-]
Why would you not be able to make it out of Strawberries? You can make Marmalade with any fruit. :)
xandrius 43 days ago [-]
Generally marmalade is made out of citrus fruits.
yamazakiwi 43 days ago [-]
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.
xandrius 42 days ago [-]
It's not about authenticity, if it is not made out of citrus fruits it's generally called a jam.
yamazakiwi 30 days ago [-]
That is incorrect.
The amount of fruit and consistency is more important to the outcome of a marmalade or jam then the use of citrus fruits. A lot of recipe sites are flat out wrong about this and state a marmalade has to contain citrus, or worse, Spanish Citrus. If I make orange Jam is it automatically Marmalade? If Korea puts corn on Pizza, is it not Pizza anymore? So as I stated, yes it is about how countries and people deem food authentic.
People who think any food has to be made one way because that's the way it was made "originally" are missing out on potential. Most food origin stories are also stretched truths, lies, or even historically selective for political reasons.
Tabular-Iceberg 43 days ago [-]
Fine, but using a ` or ‘ instead of a ' or ’ should be an arrestable offense.
Tepix 43 days ago [-]
It's not fine. It's still a disgrace. But i agree, using accents or backticks is so much worse!
blackbear_ 42 days ago [-]
Don't get me started on — versus – versus - !
mlinksva 43 days ago [-]
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
pie420 42 days ago [-]
we should always tend to having more literary devices and punctuation with which we can express ourselves. if you dont like it dont use it broski
subpixel 43 days ago [-]
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.
pjmlp 43 days ago [-]
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 geprüft?" quickly turns into "Hast du das gecheckt?".
zolbrek 43 days ago [-]
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.
em-bee 42 days ago [-]
Was meinst, kriegen wir das hin?
what's wrong with this sentence? or is it just context for the example?
zolbrek 42 days ago [-]
Yeah just context.
guitarbill 43 days ago [-]
Huh, "Hast du das gechecked?" used to mean "Hast du das kapiert?", with a quite negative connotation.
pjmlp 43 days ago [-]
Depends on the context, at least based on my experience from 1live and Cosmo interviews, and some TV series.
guitarbill 43 days ago [-]
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".
hilux 43 days ago [-]
Similar in India. E.g. you cannot find a news report in Hindi that doesn't contain at least a smattering of English words.
oldpersonintx 43 days ago [-]
[dead]
gerikson 43 days ago [-]
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 43 days ago [-]
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.
Tainnor 43 days ago [-]
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 43 days ago [-]
>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.
thangalin 43 days ago [-]
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" );
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 "ο".)
thangalin 42 days ago [-]
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'×6". 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.
crazygringo 42 days ago [-]
> many documents containing information that can not be parsed unambiguously
Well, and I'd suggest the unambiguous information was usually never there in the first place. It's less of an encoding problem, and more of an input "problem". People type either a single quote/apostrophe, or a double quote, and let smart quotes sort it out.
And sure, smart quotes will fail spectacularly with your spectacularly pathological example! Heck, it took me a few seconds to figure out what on earth was going on with the first 5 characters. :)
Your example would usually be typeset properly in a physical published book because it's done with professionals manually reviewing the typography.
Just throw it in the bucket of hyphens vs. minuses vs. dashes em and en, x's versus multiplication signs... our symbols are full of ambiguities, it's not just apostrophes.
I've developed a lexer/parser that can disambiguate most cases, but wow was it a chore to write.
> Well, and I'd suggest the unambiguous information was usually never there in the first place.
Interesting. Isn't the text ambiguous because the glyphs lack the semantics to capture the usage of apostrophes versus closing single quotes? It's a Catch-22, isn't it? If UNICODE had semantics for apostrophes versus right single quotes, then our documents would be unambiguous. But we can't make them unambiguous because UNICODE doesn't capture these semantics.
crazygringo 42 days ago [-]
> If UNICODE had semantics for apostrophes versus right single quotes, then our documents would be unambiguous.
No -- as I said before, it's an input problem before anything else. There aren't separate keys for apostrophe and right single quote on the keyboard. We don't even have separate keys for left and right quotes. So even if there were encodings for them, they wouldn't be used correctly. They'd be used correctly about as often as people type a proper minus sign rather than a hyphen for subtraction, which is almost never.
thangalin 42 days ago [-]
> it's an input problem before anything else
I see where we have our wires crossed. I'm not considering the input problem because my software (KeenQuotes) parses the source document's apostrophes into their correct semantics (99.9% of the time).
My issue is that, having discerned the correct English single quotation mark (straight, apostrophe, or closing), I have no way of encoding it into a document that retains the semantics while typesetting it using common fonts (to match double quotes). My point is that if UNICODE had a way of capturing the semantics, it would at least be technically possible to create unambiguous documents, input notwithstanding.
Matthew Butterick, a typographer, states, "I’ve never seen any LaTeX-created documentation that’s gotten this right":
I sent him a screenshot showing my software typesetting the quotation marks properly, albeit with a document that has incorrect semantics (as per our discussion):
I totally appreciate the desire for more semantic encoding. I mean, it would be a dream if every sentence was semantically delimited, if every word was annotated with which hyphenation pattern it should follow for splitting across lines (when there are multiple), and whether the capital letter at the start of a sentence should remain capital even when converted to lowercase, because it's a capitalized proper noun. I could go on.
But that's not what Unicode is for. The apostrophe situation is just one of 100 things I could think of off the top of my head. Unicode encodes characters, not semantics. And this is by design, because people don't input, or want to input, semantics -- they just want to type something that looks right. Something other people can read, not something computers can semantically parse.
So we have a bunch of heuristic and AI and manual tools we use to try to annotate things semantically, and we put that information at the level of something like XML, not Unicode. Which is infinitely more flexible, because you can define and use whatever semantics you want, not limited to whatever the Unicode body decided.
If KeenQuotes gets apostrophes right 99.9% of the time, then just use that to automatically analyze all your input text and then store and process it in some kind of XML notation, like "Peter<apos>’</apos>s" or "<possessive>Peter’s</possessive>" or "<word>Peter’s</word>" or something. Unicode is the wrong level of abstraction.
thangalin 41 days ago [-]
> process it in some kind of XML notation
The output from KeenQuotes is used by KeenWrite. KeenWrite can generate text, HTML, XHTML, and PDF documents. Those output document formats lack correct the semantics because of UNICODE. As much as rolling my own XML notation would be fun, it won't work in practice---nobody would be able to publish their exported documents for viewing or general consumption. We'll have to agree to disagree on this one: I think UNICODE dropped the ball on English apostrophes where it didn't have to. Having one more character for curled apostrophes would have kept open the possibility of encoding unambiguous HTML documents (with respect to apostrophes/right single quotes for quotations; your point about other characters I quite appreciate).
mglz 43 days ago [-]
People get upset about this while you encounter statements like "life your live" regularly, sometimes even on TV.
shafyy 43 days ago [-]
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 43 days ago [-]
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 (€50,00), but is instead written behind the number with a space included (50,00 €). 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).
bonoboTP 42 days ago [-]
€ is a unit. Would you write you're ft6 tall or weigh lbs170 or that it's °F77 outside?
The weird and exceptional thing is rather that $ is put before the number, which is out of step with pronunciation.
pronik 33 days ago [-]
And still, dollars, pound, yen and basically any currency with a "funny" symbol put it in front. Seems it's not about pronounciation anymore, but more about tradition.
isametry 43 days ago [-]
> which by its whole design and intention is supposed to be written before the number (€50,00)
What makes you think that? The intention of the € 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).
> [...] 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 43 days ago [-]
It's like German humor, it's no laughing matter.
xg15 42 days ago [-]
Fun fact: There seemed to have been a similar debate in the US at one point, but for entirely different reasons.
The US still has some places that contain possessive forms in their names, such as Martha's Vineyard. That seems to have caused some controversy during a standardization effort of place names in the 19th century. The apostrophe was dropped and the official name became "Marthas Vineyard". At some point, it was changed back, I assume because it looked too awkward and ungrammatical.
(As a non-American, the more curious thing for me is that there are still place names that sound as if some 17th century explorer just sailed by and casually gifted the place to his wife. I'd now also like to know who John E. was.)
Meanwhile in English we have our own apostrophe catastrophe where it's become commonplace online to add one to a plural.
FireBeyond 43 days ago [-]
Or the Americanism of double quotes for emphasis:
> Bob's "Big" Bookstore!
bee_rider 43 days ago [-]
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.
morsch 43 days ago [-]
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.
kristjansson 43 days ago [-]
Even worse with food.
> Bob's "Best" Burgers
what's wrong with the burgers??
pfdietz 43 days ago [-]
Is that for emphasis, or is that to cast doubt on the word?
g-b-r 43 days ago [-]
Is that really common?
asimpletune 43 days ago [-]
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 43 days ago [-]
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 43 days ago [-]
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 43 days ago [-]
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".
43 days ago [-]
zelphirkalt 43 days ago [-]
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 43 days ago [-]
It is actually explained in the article, with mention to Barbaras Rhabarberbar.
rob74 43 days ago [-]
> 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?
em-bee 42 days ago [-]
once a word is integrated in german, using german grammar rules seems perfectly fine. but if i read "parties" im a german sentence, i would feel surprised
however there are also plenty of counterexamples especially on the plural of foreign words, especially from latin, where a latin plural is expected.
what this suggests to me is that singular and plural have to be integrated separately.
"party" is essentially already a german word. "parties" isn't (yet)
"party" distinguishes itself from "feier" because the later means "celebration", where as "party" in german can be used for parties that don't celebrate anything.
ars 43 days ago [-]
Can you explain what's different about Glasses vs Tavern, where it's allowed in one and not the other?
Wytwwww 43 days ago [-]
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.
cdrini 43 days ago [-]
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 43 days ago [-]
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 43 days ago [-]
Darn thank you for the correction! I forgot a "not" in there. Fixed!
sigmoid10 43 days ago [-]
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!!!
umanwizard 43 days ago [-]
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 43 days ago [-]
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.
cdrini 43 days ago [-]
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 43 days ago [-]
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 43 days ago [-]
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).
pronik 43 days ago [-]
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.
deng 43 days ago [-]
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 Würstchenbude" 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.
lakomen 42 days ago [-]
It's because only idiots add a 's when the German grammar clearly states that that doesn't exist.
Hermans Wintergarten
EZ.
But idiots add the 's everywhere.
And now the grammar gets changed because too many idiots use 's wrong
ashishb 43 days ago [-]
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/
rwoerz 42 days ago [-]
As a German, I am totally fine with that now allowed use of the apostrohe. But what I find really annoying is the rise of the Deppenleerzeichen (idiot's space). In proper German, you can rely on that a single thing is being denoted by a single string with no spaces in the middle (comparable identifiers in most programming languages). Dashes are still allowed in compound words for better readability (like "dash case" in programming languages).
pflenker 43 days ago [-]
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.
lagniappe 43 days ago [-]
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.
Supernaut 43 days ago [-]
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.
int_19h 43 days ago [-]
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.
bitwize 43 days ago [-]
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 43 days ago [-]
I can see how "unnecessary" periods could be considered excessively formal in some contexts like texting, but ... arrogant?
bitwize 43 days ago [-]
Yeah, apparently it makes you come off as a know-it-all in texting or DMing,and is therefore considered rude.
int_19h 43 days ago [-]
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.
lagniappe 42 days ago [-]
This comment thread didn't need to be taken to that level
bitwize 43 days ago [-]
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.
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)
anigbrowl 43 days ago [-]
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.
pjmlp 43 days ago [-]
Extra points for the Barbaras Rhabarberbar mention.
What bothers me is when people confuse ` grave accents with apostrophes ', to the grammar gulags with the lot of 'em.
kps 42 days ago [-]
I have seen people use commas. Don,t do that.
eleveriven 43 days ago [-]
For many, language is a key part of cultural identity, and changes in grammar can feel like a threat to that identity.
thrownawaysz 43 days ago [-]
But we should all bow down to the american cultural imperialism because why not
renewiltord 43 days ago [-]
Whether you should or not is irrelevant because you will. No imperialism deigns to ask.
Suzuran 42 days ago [-]
It's not like English is much better on its own; We have the "Progressive Apostrophe", which is intended to warn the reader than the letter S is about to appear ("not responsible for accident's", "employee's must wash hand's", etc)
meling 43 days ago [-]
> 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?
rootusrootus 43 days ago [-]
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.
NotYourLawyer 43 days ago [-]
If y’all don’t like the English style, maybe you should have tried harder and won WWII.
lovecg 43 days ago [-]
Oh well, at least we don’t need help highlighting every noun in a sentence.
fennecfoxy 42 days ago [-]
The fact they called it the "idiot's apostrophe" makes me glad that it's being adopted in Germany. Jooooin us, join us Anglosphere idiots in our grammar rules!
amadeuspagel 43 days ago [-]
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?
BeretEnjoyer 43 days ago [-]
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.
amadeuspagel 42 days ago [-]
Compare:
- Sport Bar
- Lounge Bar
- Cafe Bar
(All from real german bar names.)
- Rosis Bar
Rosis could just as well be a word like Sport, Lounge or Cafe.
layer8 42 days ago [-]
Correct German orthography would require a hyphen for the interpretation as a compound noun.
Rosis-Bar = a bar serving (or otherwise related to) “Rosis”
Rosis Bar = Rosi’s bar
layer8 43 days ago [-]
Or some unkind drink.
animal531 42 days ago [-]
Let's see, Rosi's Bar. Fine.
Ross's Bar? No, can't be. Ross' Bar? Argh. I'm all for style but unnecessary additions just make life difficult.
croes 43 days ago [-]
That's like changing the spelling of Espresso to Expresso
deng 43 days ago [-]
It's not, unless you are able to hear a difference between "Tea's Buchladen" and "Teas Buchladen".
croes 43 days ago [-]
It is because it's just giving in to the habit of some people.
deng 43 days ago [-]
So I suppose you never gave in and you still vehemently write "bureau" instead of "Büro"?
It's just spelling. Also, please check your old Duden, Regel 16b, you will be surprised.
croes 42 days ago [-]
Büro is the German spelling of a foreign word.
But Eva's Blumenladen is a foreign spelling of German words.
int_19h 43 days ago [-]
There's an obvious upside for those people. Is there any obvious downside for everyone else?
croes 42 days ago [-]
The downside is you don't know if Eva's Blumenladen is wrong or correct spelling, because only as a name it's correct.
That creates additional confusion for learners
Additionally the spelling with an apostrophe needs more space therefore more material to print and print onto. A waste of resources.
It's like the Deppen-Bindestrich and ruins the compactness of German spelling.
Maybe english should adapt body back for backpack in exchange.
RegnisGnaw 43 days ago [-]
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.
Muromec 43 days ago [-]
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.
umanwizard 43 days ago [-]
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.
dackle 43 days ago [-]
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.
int_19h 43 days ago [-]
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 43 days ago [-]
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 43 days ago [-]
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 43 days ago [-]
> 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 42 days ago [-]
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.
forinti 43 days ago [-]
You can bet old German ladies already point out people's mistakes.
RegnisGnaw 43 days ago [-]
Do they go around threatening fines and suspension of their business license?
btbuildem 43 days ago [-]
Ha. "greengrocer’s apostrophe" is a very polite way of referring to those who put an apostrophe before every trailing "s".
kemiller 43 days ago [-]
English takes influence from other languages left and right, but there's always someone salty when it goes the other way.
booleandilemma 43 days ago [-]
That dynamism English has is something that makes it such a great language, imo.
For an article about linguistics, that title sure is hard to read.
allemagne 43 days ago [-]
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.
Wytwwww 43 days ago [-]
> 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.
ttepasse 41 days ago [-]
My impression is completely different, it's less the state but more the media.
Some first standardisations started with the beginning of the printed media, especially Luther's bible translation, then later printed grammar manuals. In the 19th century newspapers and publishing had an impact which streamlined the written word, becoming "Standard German" which through these influences is rather descended from central Germany, not Prussia.
AFAIK the "high" in high German doesn’t come from class but from geographical position - high is more upriver than the low countries in the north.
As for oral dialects: There was no concerted campaign against dialects like in France as far as I know; here it is actual more of a class thing. Again the media plays a role: the rise of radio and television in the latter half of the 20th century has a harmonising effect, deemphasising dialects.
leipert 43 days ago [-]
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.
CLiED 42 days ago [-]
Ironic, given that the apostrophe is dying out in English.
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.
It's sort of ironic that after Brittonic was largely wiped out by Germanic settlers, we now send back apostrophes to annoy them.
mattlondon 43 days ago [-]
"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.
guenthert 42 days ago [-]
I probably have spent too much time in 'merica (yeah, that must be it, not that I would be such a Depp), but I don't see the problem.
"Even before the rule clarification, the German orthographic council permitted the use of the possessive apostrophe for the sake of clarity, such as “Andrea’s Bar” to make clear that the owner is called Andrea and not Andreas."
And what's wrong with more clarity?
theandrewbailey 43 days ago [-]
> 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).
praptak 43 days ago [-]
"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")
Corporate English is a blight. So many ugly substitutions, overloading existing words, for perfectly good and common words we already have.
mwigdahl 43 days ago [-]
It is my belief that you may not fully leverage the synergistic potential of the value-added verbosity inherent in corporate linguistics.
daveslash 43 days ago [-]
Agreed. It's very important to maximize cross-functional coherence to capitalize on strategic imperatives for maximal growth opportunities.
sokoloff 43 days ago [-]
Unless there’s a fulcrum involved, I don’t want to read the word “leverage”.
wizzwizz4 43 days ago [-]
The fulcrum is externalities. Good ask, though!
lxgr 43 days ago [-]
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 43 days ago [-]
We should take this offline so we can really zoom in.
Muromec 43 days ago [-]
Corporate life is just really boring and this kind of nonsense is understood as fun by people engaging in it.
okeuro49 43 days ago [-]
"informations" is a good one for non-native English language speakers to look out for.
psychoslave 43 days ago [-]
But did you know that there huge load of "datas" out there?
jjk166 43 days ago [-]
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.
inkcapmushroom 43 days ago [-]
Datum is the singular, which is one point of data. When you group together a datum with another datum, they become data.
jjk166 42 days ago [-]
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.
jamincan 43 days ago [-]
And the origin of that plural form comes from Latin.
nobody9999 43 days ago [-]
>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'?
pjot 43 days ago [-]
As is “codes” - I hear this often from non-native colleagues
ben_w 43 days ago [-]
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 43 days ago [-]
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 43 days ago [-]
In scientific computing, they tend to say "code" where the rest of us would say "program".
generic92034 43 days ago [-]
Programs? I rarely hear it these days. It's all "apps". ;)
Spivak 43 days ago [-]
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 43 days ago [-]
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 43 days ago [-]
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 43 days ago [-]
Source codes of dependencies. Might be acceptable...
Also why not pluralise all words? Sources codes.
samatman 43 days ago [-]
Hearing "codes" generally means you've found yourself around Fortran. Simple as.
nanna 43 days ago [-]
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 43 days ago [-]
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).
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?)
t0mas88 43 days ago [-]
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 43 days ago [-]
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.
vundercind 43 days ago [-]
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”.
oneeyedpigeon 43 days ago [-]
"Wether"—I see what you did there...
umanwizard 43 days ago [-]
> 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.
Semaphor 43 days ago [-]
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?
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 совет and "advices" (or advice pl.) is советы. 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 43 days ago [-]
Yeah, but at least the examples wikipedia has, are for similar words, not just applying random other grammatical rules:
informations (French) -> informations (English)
compétences -> competences
causi 43 days ago [-]
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.
zztop44 43 days ago [-]
“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.
oneeyedpigeon 43 days ago [-]
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.
drewcoo 43 days ago [-]
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 43 days ago [-]
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!
bee_rider 43 days ago [-]
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 43 days ago [-]
I've heard my wife say it that way because it is a plural in her native language.
njtransit 43 days ago [-]
Learning can be the gerund form of the verb “to learn” and isn’t necessarily a noun referring to the abstract concept.
raverbashing 43 days ago [-]
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 43 days ago [-]
Er, yes because they're short for he is and she is. You mean "his" and "hers".
raverbashing 43 days ago [-]
But you don't write them like that, you write "his/hers"
oneeyedpigeon 43 days ago [-]
Different words. "His dog" means the dog belonging to him. "He's a dog" means "he is a dog".
raverbashing 43 days ago [-]
> 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.
43 days ago [-]
ben_w 43 days ago [-]
"He's got a head shaped like a massive orange"
"Who?"
"Xtk'act'sbu"
"Oh no, not the Klingon cosplayer!"
itronitron 43 days ago [-]
So is this the proper form?
-> it's putting the lotion on its skin
mouse_ 43 days ago [-]
he's/she's going to have to deal with it
nozzlegear 43 days ago [-]
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.
locallost 43 days ago [-]
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.
bagels 43 days ago [-]
The signs are in English, why does it matter how they would be written in German?
lxgr 43 days ago [-]
How so? "Harald's Eck" (one of the examples from the article) doesn't sound very English to me.
bagels 42 days ago [-]
The first two given are "Rossi's Bar" and "Kati's Kiosk" which are perfectly reasonable English names for places, but it turns out that Bar and Kiosk are also perfectly fine words in German too. How about that.
patrickmcnamara 43 days ago [-]
The signs are not in English.
maxnoe 43 days ago [-]
How is Blumenladen English?
mattferderer 43 days ago [-]
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.
[edit] Maybe Twain, anyway. The attribution is dubious, but common.
nobody9999 43 days ago [-]
>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.
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)
_visgean 43 days ago [-]
I think the conclusion is wrong; that sounds much more like dutch.
diggan 43 days ago [-]
I think that says a lot about the origin of the joke, which most likely comes from outside Europe :)
int_19h 43 days ago [-]
Dutch is more or less what you get if you take German and English and meet in the middle.
indigoabstract 43 days ago [-]
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?
xxs 43 days ago [-]
Two beers fine for an old joke!
43 days ago [-]
jjk166 43 days ago [-]
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 43 days ago [-]
As a Pole I'm also fairly annoyed by having to use English daily ;)
phkahler 43 days ago [-]
In the air traffic example it's required so everyone on the radio can understand everything going on around them.
falcor84 43 days ago [-]
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 43 days ago [-]
There's no authority that can enforce such a rule.
falcor84 42 days ago [-]
That's a good point. Maybe it could be handled like the Geneva conventions?
int_19h 42 days ago [-]
Geneva conventions don't really have a good enforcement story, either - not against countries like Russia (or China, or US). If you're Rwanda or Yugoslavia, that's a different story, but note that in those cases it was UNSC that established the corresponding tribunals, so if the violator has UNSC veto power, that avenue is effectively blocked.
43 days ago [-]
cafard 43 days ago [-]
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 43 days ago [-]
I'm a little about myself that I understood this plus the deep cuts. Well done.
orwin 43 days ago [-]
'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 43 days ago [-]
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 42 days ago [-]
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 42 days ago [-]
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):
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.
jasonpeacock 43 days ago [-]
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 ;)
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 43 days ago [-]
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 43 days ago [-]
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 43 days ago [-]
German seems even more obsessed with gender than English, and the exceptions (der Junge -vs- das Mädchen) 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 43 days ago [-]
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 43 days ago [-]
Good point - maybe you're right and just I'm a gender-obsessed sexist. Thanks.
fennecfoxy 42 days ago [-]
Tbf so many instances they don't use "they" but "he or she"...where my thinking is, not only is it more inclusive but it's actually easier to just use "they"?
cubefox 42 days ago [-]
> and people suddenly realizing they were already recognizing genderless people without knowing it ;)
They weren't recognizing genderless people just because they used "they" when the gender was unknown ;)
jasonpeacock 42 days ago [-]
Yes, you're correct. I think I was trying to find a succinct way to say "everyone was happily using 'they' without concern until gendering became a hot topic and suddenly they noticed their usage of 'they' and didn't like that it was already an acceptable and in-use solution for including genderless people" or something like that :)
xdennis 43 days ago [-]
> 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."
kayodelycaon 43 days ago [-]
> 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.
jasonpeacock 43 days ago [-]
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.
DonHopkins 43 days ago [-]
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.
carlosjobim 42 days ago [-]
What a comment...
The person you responded to is right. If you start mixing in "they" you're just confusing the listener, because they will assume you're now talking about some different people. I wouldn't have the patience to listen to somebody who speaks in that matter and deliberately makes their words cryptic.
DonHopkins 42 days ago [-]
Sexist assholes who become performatively confused and impatient and pretend they can't understand you and stop listening are just signaling that they are sexist assholes.
carlosjobim 41 days ago [-]
Do you think anybody at all wants to listen to you if you speak in this way?
int_19h 43 days ago [-]
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.
zargon 43 days ago [-]
> 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 43 days ago [-]
It's the first time I see a company's name used like that.
ldoughty 43 days ago [-]
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.
> * 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
> * 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 43 days ago [-]
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.
OJFord 43 days ago [-]
> 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 43 days ago [-]
"go" + verb is a specific idiom, but I can't say that "try eat" is common or widely accepted as correct in American English.
unsupp0rted 43 days ago [-]
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.
cubefox 42 days ago [-]
> * Companies switched from being singular plurals ("Google is deprecating another product.") to plural singulars ("Google are deprecating another product.")
I think that's just a grammatical error that people (sometimes) make, and it isn't even specific to English.
ghayes 43 days ago [-]
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 43 days ago [-]
It’s adapted from “look it up”. Or maybe more specifically, it’s “look it up using internet search”.
talideon 42 days ago [-]
Your "plural singulars" have been the normal way of doing things in much of the Anglosphere outside of North America for quite some time.
helpfulContrib 43 days ago [-]
German is not that easy, either, though.
Das/Der/Die is a constant source of frustration. Its never easy to remember.
inglor_cz 43 days ago [-]
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 nůž (masc.) - DE: das Messer (neutr.) - EN: knife
CZ: ten svět (masc.) - DE: die Welt (fem.) - EN: world
CZ: ta žába (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.
int_19h 43 days ago [-]
It also doesn't help when words in a single language that can refer to the same thing have different grammatical genders (e.g. месяц vs луна).
inglor_cz 43 days ago [-]
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
Muromec 43 days ago [-]
To nobody's surprise ніж, світ, жаба have exactly right genders so it's Germans who are confused.
inglor_cz 43 days ago [-]
But, for some weird reason, modern Bulgarian mutated gender of "evening" to feminine:
Тази вечер
even though in the greeting "good evening", the old masculine form remains:
добър вечер
Bulgarian in general seems to be the Chad of the Slavic language family :)
OptionOfT 43 days ago [-]
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 43 days ago [-]
How about up to seven cases and three genders in Slavic languages? That's the real struggle.
DrillShopper 43 days ago [-]
When in doubt use das like half the population of Berlin.
jeffbee 43 days ago [-]
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 43 days ago [-]
> 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").
ttyprintk 43 days ago [-]
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 43 days ago [-]
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 43 days ago [-]
Unless you're selling glasses under that name, then it's fine. Lol.
43 days ago [-]
impish9208 43 days ago [-]
[flagged]
43 days ago [-]
jsnell 43 days ago [-]
By the site guidelines, a small number of duplicate submissions are fine if the initial post didn't get any significant attention. That's clearly the case here.
impish9208 43 days ago [-]
But what about my karma and bragging rights? :)
alex_john_m 43 days ago [-]
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. :)))
xdennis 43 days ago [-]
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. hrană is [ˈxra.nə] even though people think they say [ˈhra.nə]
* 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 /koˈpi.iʲ/ . In the past /j/ and /ʲ/ were written with ĭ making things a bit easier.
* Stress is not written which causes confusions between words like "muie" /mu'je/ (softened) and "muie" /'muje/ (blowjob)
* /ɨ/is written as both î and â based on some stupid rule to preserve România being writen as România instead of Romînia. 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 43 days ago [-]
> 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 љ and nj for њ), they are unambiguous - there's no contrast between "lj" and "l" followed by "j", unlike say Russian where you need to distinguish between "лёд" and "льёт" somehow.
If you want no digraphs at all, Serbian and Montenegrin Cyrillic is still not ideal because "дз" is a digraph. Macedonian fixes it by using the historical Cyrillic "ѕ" [д]зело 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 "ь" for palatalization of consonants you can also repurpose the "soft" vowels to indicate fronting of vowels specifically.
konart 42 days ago [-]
> unlike say Russian where you need to distinguish between "лёд" and "льёт" somehow.
But they are very different, no?) I'd think mistaking "лёд" for "йод" is easier.
int_19h 42 days ago [-]
In IPA notation, it's the difference between [ʎɵ] and [ʎjɵ], and contrasting the two is fairly rare in natural languages; East Slavic is somewhat unusual in that regard. If someone's language does not have this contrast, it sounds very similar to them, and distinguishing the two can be very difficult. Even in languages where such a distinction exists, there's a tendency towards a merger - Serbo-Croatian is one example of that, but the same is also happening in e.g. some dialects of Spanish with "ñ" [ɲ] vs "ny" [nj]. English speakers also have this problem with Spanish, by the way, hence why "cañon" became "canyon".
In general, what's perceived as "very different" or not is very subjective based on what one is used to. E.g. the distinction between "v" and "w" is very significant in English, but for speakers of many Slavic languages, those are allophones, and when they learn English they have trouble using them correctly.
konart 41 days ago [-]
True, same for Chinese and their tones. One would think it should be pretty easy to distinguish them, but even when doing basic homework it sometimes hard to tell one from another.
Same for `chuáng` 床（） vs `chuán` （船）。
aguaviva 42 days ago [-]
Not as much as you would think.
Russian has terminal de-voicing; so /d/ softens to a /t/, hence сад = /sat/. (Sort of; actually it's something in between, but the shift is noticable).
And /l/ palatizes (becomes /lj/) before both е and ё, as in самолёт. (Actually the /j/ is built into ё of course, but somehow it seems helpful to recognize the commonality of the sounds when realized after /l/ - basically е becomes more yoff-like).
The vowel might differ (one may be more fronted or rounded than the other), but that tends to vary among speakers anyway.
Russian has a whole suite of secondary rules like this.
Ukrainian by contrast is much more phonetic. But unlike English, at least Russian has a system.
int_19h 42 days ago [-]
The interesting part here is /lj/ vs /lʲj/.
aguaviva 42 days ago [-]
Thanks for swooping down to correct. It's the small touches that matter.
konart 41 days ago [-]
I mean I'm native, just expressing personal opinion.
aguaviva 40 days ago [-]
I'll have to slow down and listen more carefully, then.
41 days ago [-]
rafram 43 days ago [-]
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.
Tainnor 43 days ago [-]
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 43 days ago [-]
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.
reject the alphabet and stop writing vowels unless really needed.
badmintonbaseba 43 days ago [-]
Hungarian gets pretty close too, but yeah, there are exceptions.
int_19h 43 days ago [-]
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.
ExoticPearTree 43 days ago [-]
Oh no... anyway.
Seriously, who cares that some organizational body in Germany has an issue with the English language? :)
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
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
We feel you over here in Sweden. Särskrivning (roughly “word splitting”) is a “problem” far greater than the apostrophes for us. Americentric Swedish Android keyboards are terrible offenders that happily splits words in two.
This is how language evolves nowadays. :/
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41796834
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
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.
Also In Swedish splitting the words is many cases not incorrect, but just changes the meaning.
For example is Swedish an "English teacher" (Engelsk lärare) would be a teacher that is from England, while an "Englishteacher" is a teacher the teaches the subject English.
So "He is an English teacher" and "He is an Englishteacher" would both be valid sentences in Swedish, but the predictive text model seems to assume you wanted the first one.
Personally I think our "language culture" is overrated and I wouldn't care if Dutch just disappeared completely in favour of English.
It might have looked 'modern' (or rather progressive) seventy years ago (or thirty years ago in the east); these days using proper German seems rather backward, dated or borderline fascist.
It got pretty absurd over the last decades though. My parents were complaining about the bill they got from Telekom -- why in the world were 'Ferngespräche' listed there as 'long distance calls' in a text otherwise (near) German?
Now, I would love to see more English being used in Germany, particularly in official communication as there are plenty of people here who's first language isn't German. But why not both? It's not that much more work. Denglish however belongs strictly banned into the realm of comedy (recently I've seen a gas station advertizing its "Power Sauger" :))
For clarity, we already called them Handy when they were phones but not smart.
I guess it's different when you grew up with those words and internalized them.
A lot of it is just (1) use of French loanwords to refer to EU-specific concepts (acquis is arguably the most famous), (2) use of genuine but rare English words – for example "subsidiarity", a word few English-speakers know, but the EU loves – but it isn't exclusive to the EU, Catholic theologians love it too (there is a whole section devoted to it in the Catholic Catechism), (3) the kind of common linguistic errors (false cognates, etc) which French speakers (and to a lesser degree, speakers of other EU languages) make when speaking English.
There are also some cases where it is hard to say if what is happening is (1) or (3), for example the use of the word "cabinet" (pronounced the French way) to refer to the office staff of a senior official
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.)
In English I’m actually ok with it for single letters or abbreviations- “your writing uses a lot of x’s and y’s”, “Can you pack away the CD’s and DVD’s”, but this is a personal quirk and definitely non-standard usage.
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.
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."
[1] https://classics.osu.edu/Undergraduate-Studies/Latin-Program...
Fred Meyer is also not "Fred Meyer's" but at least I can see why that would happen.
Then you have Vons, which used to be "Von's Grocery Company." I guess you go in there now and there's just more than one guy named Von in the store.
Ralphs also dropped the apostrophe.
Albertson's is now "Albertsons."
Kinda funny it seems like Americans are dropping the apostrophes. The exact opposite of what the article is talking about.
At least nobody is saying "Let's go to Costco's."
Also in the PNW, everybody called it "Penny's" for as long as I can remember.
So calling it Uno's isn't inconsistent with how we talk about Walmart's stores or Google's website, for example.
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."
some examples:
80s: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Downtown_Seattle_Pen...
70s: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:FW_Woolworth,_Penney...
60s: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Penneys,_Eastland_Ma...
50s: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:StateLibQld_1_46896_...
40s: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Seattle_-_Second_Ave...
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.
Fun tangent: I learned pretty recently that the southern California grocery chain is named after a man with the last name "Ralphs," so it never had an apostrophe and indeed shouldn't have one (in any language).
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
Could it be that we spell it differently because the word was adopted before spelling was standardised in either language?
This is not true at all. Most of the core vocabulary is derived from Old English. We’ve borrowed a ton of vocabulary to expand new concepts, but the core has remained relatively stable.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_English_words_of_Old...
Note though that in German, "-s" is also a genitive suffix, it's just the spelling that's different here.
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."
Edit: As a partially related aside, I have a friend who's right about the same age as me that's incredulous that I was taught to use "they" as a gender neutral pronoun when the subject's gender was unknown (or you desired not convey a gender) back in the late 80s and early 90s. Maybe it's just a regional difference in teaching or something. He's from the UP of Michigan, I'm from Florida. So maybe the same thing is true with possessive nouns
https://www.doughopkins.com/
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.
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...
That said, it's still a massive improvement on English phonologically. Even if you only consider the simpler American varieties, the three-way æ/ɐ/ɑ 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 θ and ð 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.
But I agree that overly large phonemic inventory is a problem. On the other hand, it seems that languages either have a complex consonant system but a simple vowel system; or a simple consonant system but a complex vowel system; I haven't yet seen a language where both systems are simple (Japanese vowels have tonality, so it's not a simple system IMHO), probably because the words in such a language would have to be quite long.
There are quite a few languages where both vowel and consonant systems are simple - just look at Polynesian languages such as Māori. The latter's vowel system is 5-vowel, and "long vowels" are phonemically vowel sequences that span moras. But, yes, it does mean that you end up with long words such as "whakararurarutia". That said, it's a rather extreme case, and one can still construct fairly simple but rich consonant systems in practice, because it's basically combinatorics - adding just one more bit of information doubles the domain space! So e.g. if you start with a strict CV consonant system and allow C(l/r)V, that's almost 4x as many contrasting syllables. Make it C(l/r/w/y)V(C) like in Globasa, and even with considerable restrictions on clustering stops etc this is enough for most words to be 3 syllables or less, and for most function words to be 1 syllable.
Now, the real success of Esperanto is that it does have an over 1 century international active community that does produce it’s own cultural artifacts, using Esperanto as a communication mean. All that without a bound army to back it at any point, that’s probably an unique feat in human history. Also to make it clear, it was not meant to be a universal language, but an international one.
Personally, I love that projects like Globasa comes to live. On a pragmatic level, large scale adoption is unlikely, but that is the case of any human endeavor. Let’s make sure that grandiloquence result likeliness never inhibit beautiful dreams being pursued.
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.
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.
The story I heard about how Rumantsch (~40k L1) became the 4th language of switzerland is that one day toward the middle of last century, after Mussolini said that rumantsch speakers were just a bunch of farmers who didn't know how to speak proper italian, the swiss people essentially said « Esti d'épais à marde ! » by voting to make it official.
Lagniappe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BjoCmyhTSBU
I know some people that talk to there parents in Rumantsch that but most likely wont teach it to their children.
It will survive but its not really thriving either. Other languages is a great way to push against an 'enemy' language, like the revival of Gaulish in Ireland.
But we will get pretty good AI of it since there is so much official documentation in it.
(after all, even Gian and Giachen speak german)
Lagniappe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UxMuCyzXgC4
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.)
[1]https://www.barrons.com/amp/news/english-just-badly-pronounc...
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.
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.
Amusingly, using the French words is a signal to being upper class. Such as "purchase" (pourchacier) instead of "buy" (byan).
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.
I was taught that this is because the Normans pushed the Germanics out and up north. French dominated the royal court.
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
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
There's always a relation between a spoken word and its written representation, they're the same thing in different mediums.
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.
- 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.
How words were pronounced can be deduced from poetry.
Of course. But it's not like we know nothing about it.
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.
(see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English-language_spelling_refo...)
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...
https://www.bipm.org/documents/20126/28433818/working-docume...
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.
As I recall, the American spelling of color and other words like that was actually dictated by a "pompous authority", namely Noah Webster, who wrote the dictionary bearing his name. He wanted to simplify some spellings he saw as overly complicated. I happen to agree with him, but this wasn't because of regular, everyday people in different regions.
The Académie 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 Québec, but only for Québec.
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.
I don't think an English standardization would change much in how people actually speak.
Imagine some would stick with original "bonjour" (Qubec), other more progressive would simplify to "bojur" and whatnote.
You have the same with "colour" and "color". Or "night" and "nite". From my observatio where you have some language authority there is at least consisten spelling (and english spelling is all over the place)
en_US vs. en_GB
fr_CA vs fr_FR
Besides, in case of Spanish the spelling is more uniform. Aforementioned locales are mostly for GUIs and regional wording differences. And the thread started with "unifying english spelling" which is just a mess…
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
How could it? English is not a tonal language at all, so how could you possibly represent tonality with Latin characters, in a way that English speakers with no extra training could read such text and pronounce the Chinese word in an acceptable way? I don't think it's possible. It's just like trying to use Japanese characters to represent English names: a LOT is lost in translation, because there's simply no way to represent all English sounds in Japanese, since Japanese has far fewer possible sounds than English.
>It could go the other way if Mandarin is the dominant trade language.
But it's not, English is, like it or not. If you want to communicate with someone in any random country in the world, you have a very good chance of doing so if you speak English, regardless of your or the listener's native language. The same isn't true for Mandarin.
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 特朗普/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).
Consider a rather unusual (but real nevertheless) Polish surname: «Brzęczyszczykiewicz». Most native English speakers, who are not well known for their patience with long and unusually looking non-native surnames, will instantly give up and shorten it to a mere «B». The most daring and adventurous ones will persevere and will likely arrive at something akin to «Brenshistishkevich», which is neither correct nor easily pronounceable for an English speaker anyway. The few English speakers who are acquainted with Polish, would render and pronounce «Brzęczyszczykiewicz» as «Bzhenchishchikyevich» which is closer to truth, yet it will confuse everyone else who will stick with «Brenshistishkevich» anyway.
Or consider an Icelandic surname of «Þórðarson». We would have «Thordarson» (as a naïve take) or «Thortharson» (somewhat closer to the actual Icelandic version).
Bonus point: Llanfairpwllgwyngyll, a Welsh surname, with the «colloquial» vocalisation of «Lanfarpwilgwingle» vs «Hlan-fair-pool-gwin-gith» (a more truthful rendition).
In all cases, with Brenshistishkevich, Thordarson and Llanfairpwllgwyngyll, we have arrived at the English equivalent of Te Lang Pu (Trump). In fact, there is no need to look at more extreme cases, it will suffice to consider a simple Vietnamese name of «Huy», which most English speakers will pronounce as «Hughey» whereas it is actually «Hwee» – it is still the case of the English Te Lang Pu.
In the case of Mandarin Chinese, the problem is exacerbated by the fact that the Chinese writing script is logographic and can't encode single consonants (single sounds in general, although there are Chinese characters that encode vowelled words, usually exclamations). Secondly (or firstly, in fact), all Chinese languages have a strict rule of a phoneme having the CV(C) structure (Consonant-Vowel(maybe another Consonant)), which makes the CCVCC (i.e. Trump) compound impossible and is completely against the phonetic rules of the language. And many, very many in fact, Chinese speakers neither know pinyin nor speak English. The same is true for many other non-Chinese languages.
It gets a bit better, e.g., in Japanese that, other than the logographic script, has two syllabaries that make it possible to represent Trump as something probably more like Tu-ru-mpu.
> I used to work with a man who's last name was Cao whose name was mispronounced "Cow" […]
Since you also earlier called out «[…] (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», spelling Cao as Tsao (which is what they do in Taiwan but not in the mainland) is not going help as nearly all English speakers will drop the «t» and pronounce it as «Sao». And, since «ts» is one sound and not two, «Sao» is also the English Te Lang Pu.
I honestly don’t care if someone uses “color” or “colour” or makes ghoti jokes at the English language’s expense.
Unfortunately for the rest of the world outside of your beloved "anglosphere" using wrong spelling results in said "anglosphereian" being utterly butthurt.
Maybe the whole world should adopt universal language with saner spelling and leave english to anglosphere?
Don’t put words in my mouth.
> Maybe the whole world should adopt universal language with saner spelling and leave english to anglosphere?
The rest of the world could. They won’t. But they could. You could use this as part of your spelling reforms: https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=81 :)
The US doesn't use Imperial units; it uses "US Customary" units. They're not the same, though there is some overlap. Imperial units are used in the UK, which is why they're called "imperial" (from "empire"--the British Empire). Imperial inches, for instance, are the same as US inches (2.54cm), but UK/Imperial gallons are quite different from US gallons, which is why the miles-per-gallon ratings for cars are so different between the two countries.
> 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.
From my observation adoption of english (and it's slang) is mostly due to "verbal colonialism" - pop culture mixed with "we work in english" spiced with "I'm cool so I'll drop this pointless slang from foreign language"...
Erm... curious that you brought that up as I lived in Chile for a couple of years and now in Spain. And while I agree that Chilean Spanish is wild it does follow RAE spelling guidelines, or at the very least I haven't seen any obvious deviations. Now there's a lot of modismos ("chilenismos", local words formed usually by borrowing from natives Mapuche in south or Quechua in the north) but they still tend to follow more-or-less spelling. Accent/pronounciation is yet another thing but that doesn't affect spelling all that much. And on top of that there is a lot of "mutilation" of words when using whatsapp (either being in a hurry or being from low social background) but even in even so slightly more formal setting people immediatelly fallback to official spelling.
(Spanish is more gracefull when it comes to spelling as "what you hear you write" and vice versa so maybe the problem is less pronounced)
I doubt either country will ever accept the other's version.
> 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.
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.
All languages evolve through time, but I think that a major factor of evolution was the fact that it was accepted ~20 years ago that it's OK to write phonetically at school. And now we have school teachers that learned that way so it's definitely a standard feature of the current French.
For example the following hilarious reader comment in the economic news website "La Tribune":
"plutot que dire 18 milliares de deficte pour faire les gros titres il serais plus interessant de dire d'ou vient le soit disant deficite . La secu ne serait elle pas victime de paiement de prestations qui ne la concerne pas . qui s'en richie sur son dos ? N y aurit il pas des acteurs economiques qui ne participeraient pas a son financement et par contre lui demanderait des presttions ? c'est cela que lon veut savoir un peut comme les retriates ou le regime generale eponge les déficites qui ne le concerne pas par ce que letat ne finance pas les retaites de la fonction publique a son juste niveau."
While it may be accidental, maybe stemming the tide against Franglais will have a large secondary benefit for the minority language speakers of France. If your average native Gallo(e.g.) speaker needs to learn French in order to watch the news, that's one thing. If they then need to learn a bunch of English in order to speak French, well there's even less of a chance that they'll be able to spend a lot of their life speaking Gallo.
IDK maybe it will make no difference for those languages; French will crowd them out regardless of how much English there is in French.
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.
and some minor contribution from the Normans of course...
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.
At least that should be the case in free societies. Language is power - and controlling it is an important aspect of exercising control.
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.
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) --> manggåfa (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=...
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
(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)
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.
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
'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 'mél', tho.
If you just let it "develop organically" without any governing body you get a wide range of dialects that will drift further apart from another and it will be very difficult to read any text that is 50 years old.
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.
For example in Lithuanian, an "influencer" is colloquially called "influenceris". But in Lithuanian "influence" translates to "įtakos", so it isn't anywhere close to correct.
The terms "įtakdarys" (influence maker) or "nuomonės 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Association_of_Academies_of_th...
France is bacon.
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 Ælla, 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...
But hey, there are no rules or logic in English so have at it!
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)
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
---
[a] https://www.britannica.com/topic/Romance-languages
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/casă/chez because common people referred to their house by the word "casa".
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...
The phrasing "evolved in the past due to the influence of" has a more expansive meaning than "influenced by."
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.
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
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.
I would have loved to watch that conversation :-)
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.
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.
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...
That's what she said!
For example "Photo's".
Why is 'Eva's Brille incorrect', but 'Eva's Blumenladen' ok?
"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.
In the same way, people will wonder why you spelled "Eva's" in "Eva's Blumenladen" wrong, if you spell it that way.
Yes, if enough people start doing a wrong thing, it'll eventually become "right", and I guess in 100 year's we can put apostrophy's where'ever we wa'nt, but currently it still looks odd, and like something that is foreign to German, and imported from English. Because unlike in English, in German this apostrophy doesn't stand for an omitted letter in the genitive singular ending.
https://www.caesars.com/caesars-palace/things-to-do/nightlif...
(This confused the heck out of me at first too.)
So Evas Blumenladen is called Eva's Blumenladen is correct.
For example 'hund' (dog) becomes "hundes" in the genitive form and was written "hund's" when the 'e' was elided.
is there any other non-foreign use of ' that is not such a replacement?
1: I was only able to find something in German: https://www.wiwo.de/politik/ausland/realsatire-aus-bruessel-...
The amount of fruit and consistency is more important to the outcome of a marmalade or jam then the use of citrus fruits. A lot of recipe sites are flat out wrong about this and state a marmalade has to contain citrus, or worse, Spanish Citrus. If I make orange Jam is it automatically Marmalade? If Korea puts corn on Pizza, is it not Pizza anymore? So as I stated, yes it is about how countries and people deem food authentic.
People who think any food has to be made one way because that's the way it was made "originally" are missing out on potential. Most food origin stories are also stretched truths, lies, or even historically selective for political reasons.
For example, "Hast Du das geprüft?" quickly turns into "Hast du das gecheckt?".
„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.
what's wrong with this sentence? or is it just context for the example?
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".
But the worst thing is usually the acute accent is used instead of a real apostrophe, which just makes it stand out even more.
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).
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.
[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
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 "ο".)
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:
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.Well, and I'd suggest the unambiguous information was usually never there in the first place. It's less of an encoding problem, and more of an input "problem". People type either a single quote/apostrophe, or a double quote, and let smart quotes sort it out.
And sure, smart quotes will fail spectacularly with your spectacularly pathological example! Heck, it took me a few seconds to figure out what on earth was going on with the first 5 characters. :)
Your example would usually be typeset properly in a physical published book because it's done with professionals manually reviewing the typography.
Just throw it in the bucket of hyphens vs. minuses vs. dashes em and en, x's versus multiplication signs... our symbols are full of ambiguities, it's not just apostrophes.
Smart quotes fail in simple cases, too.
https://gitlab.com/DaveJarvis/KeenQuotes/-/tree/main/src/tes...
I've developed a lexer/parser that can disambiguate most cases, but wow was it a chore to write.
> Well, and I'd suggest the unambiguous information was usually never there in the first place.
Interesting. Isn't the text ambiguous because the glyphs lack the semantics to capture the usage of apostrophes versus closing single quotes? It's a Catch-22, isn't it? If UNICODE had semantics for apostrophes versus right single quotes, then our documents would be unambiguous. But we can't make them unambiguous because UNICODE doesn't capture these semantics.
No -- as I said before, it's an input problem before anything else. There aren't separate keys for apostrophe and right single quote on the keyboard. We don't even have separate keys for left and right quotes. So even if there were encodings for them, they wouldn't be used correctly. They'd be used correctly about as often as people type a proper minus sign rather than a hyphen for subtraction, which is almost never.
I see where we have our wires crossed. I'm not considering the input problem because my software (KeenQuotes) parses the source document's apostrophes into their correct semantics (99.9% of the time).
My issue is that, having discerned the correct English single quotation mark (straight, apostrophe, or closing), I have no way of encoding it into a document that retains the semantics while typesetting it using common fonts (to match double quotes). My point is that if UNICODE had a way of capturing the semantics, it would at least be technically possible to create unambiguous documents, input notwithstanding.
Matthew Butterick, a typographer, states, "I’ve never seen any LaTeX-created documentation that’s gotten this right":
https://practicaltypography.com/straight-and-curly-quotes.ht...
I sent him a screenshot showing my software typesetting the quotation marks properly, albeit with a document that has incorrect semantics (as per our discussion):
https://i.ibb.co/p3TM7QM/curly-quotes.png
But that's not what Unicode is for. The apostrophe situation is just one of 100 things I could think of off the top of my head. Unicode encodes characters, not semantics. And this is by design, because people don't input, or want to input, semantics -- they just want to type something that looks right. Something other people can read, not something computers can semantically parse.
So we have a bunch of heuristic and AI and manual tools we use to try to annotate things semantically, and we put that information at the level of something like XML, not Unicode. Which is infinitely more flexible, because you can define and use whatever semantics you want, not limited to whatever the Unicode body decided.
If KeenQuotes gets apostrophes right 99.9% of the time, then just use that to automatically analyze all your input text and then store and process it in some kind of XML notation, like "Peter<apos>’</apos>s" or "<possessive>Peter’s</possessive>" or "<word>Peter’s</word>" or something. Unicode is the wrong level of abstraction.
The output from KeenQuotes is used by KeenWrite. KeenWrite can generate text, HTML, XHTML, and PDF documents. Those output document formats lack correct the semantics because of UNICODE. As much as rolling my own XML notation would be fun, it won't work in practice---nobody would be able to publish their exported documents for viewing or general consumption. We'll have to agree to disagree on this one: I think UNICODE dropped the ball on English apostrophes where it didn't have to. Having one more character for curled apostrophes would have kept open the possibility of encoding unambiguous HTML documents (with respect to apostrophes/right single quotes for quotations; your point about other characters I quite appreciate).
However, as mentioned in the article, not clear to me if this is in fact because of the English influence or some other reason.
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).
The weird and exceptional thing is rather that $ is put before the number, which is out of step with pronunciation.
What makes you think that? The intention of the € 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
Where would be the fun if there's no exception to the rule in the German language.
The US still has some places that contain possessive forms in their names, such as Martha's Vineyard. That seems to have caused some controversy during a standardization effort of place names in the 19th century. The apostrophe was dropped and the official name became "Marthas Vineyard". At some point, it was changed back, I assume because it looked too awkward and ungrammatical.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apostrophe#Possessives_in_geog...
(As a non-American, the more curious thing for me is that there are still place names that sound as if some 17th century explorer just sailed by and casually gifted the place to his wife. I'd now also like to know who John E. was.)
> Bob's "Big" Bookstore!
> Bob's "Best" Burgers
what's wrong with the burgers??
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.
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".
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.
Off topic, but now I do kind of wish the Magic: The Gathering mechanic was named "Legion" instead of "Myriad".
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?
however there are also plenty of counterexamples especially on the plural of foreign words, especially from latin, where a latin plural is expected.
what this suggests to me is that singular and plural have to be integrated separately.
"party" is essentially already a german word. "parties" isn't (yet)
"party" distinguishes itself from "feier" because the later means "celebration", where as "party" in german can be used for parties that don't celebrate anything.
So I guess this is some sort of a (certainly not arbitrary) compromise to appease both sides.
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).
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 Würstchenbude" 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.
Hermans Wintergarten
EZ.
But idiots add the 's everywhere. And now the grammar gets changed because too many idiots use 's wrong
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.
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.
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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Gv0H-vPoDc
(Nowadays I just don't double check it and it's basically a cointoss if I get it right or not :P)
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/mu7ami_how-an-apostrophe-almo...
I didn’t understand why Eva’s Brille is incorrect. Anyone understand the difference? Is it only allowed for commercial entities?
- 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?
- Sport Bar
- Lounge Bar
- Cafe Bar
(All from real german bar names.)
- Rosis Bar
Rosis could just as well be a word like Sport, Lounge or Cafe.
Rosis-Bar = a bar serving (or otherwise related to) “Rosis”
Rosis Bar = Rosi’s bar
Ross's Bar? No, can't be. Ross' Bar? Argh. I'm all for style but unnecessary additions just make life difficult.
It's just spelling. Also, please check your old Duden, Regel 16b, you will be surprised.
But Eva's Blumenladen is a foreign spelling of German words.
Additionally the spelling with an apostrophe needs more space therefore more material to print and print onto. A waste of resources.
It's like the Deppen-Bindestrich and ruins the compactness of German spelling.
Maybe english should adapt body back for backpack in exchange.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Some first standardisations started with the beginning of the printed media, especially Luther's bible translation, then later printed grammar manuals. In the 19th century newspapers and publishing had an impact which streamlined the written word, becoming "Standard German" which through these influences is rather descended from central Germany, not Prussia.
AFAIK the "high" in high German doesn’t come from class but from geographical position - high is more upriver than the low countries in the north.
As for oral dialects: There was no concerted campaign against dialects like in France as far as I know; here it is actual more of a class thing. Again the media plays a role: the rise of radio and television in the latter half of the 20th century has a harmonising effect, deemphasising dialects.
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.
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.
It's sort of ironic that after Brittonic was largely wiped out by Germanic settlers, we now send back apostrophes to annoy them.
"Even before the rule clarification, the German orthographic council permitted the use of the possessive apostrophe for the sake of clarity, such as “Andrea’s Bar” to make clear that the owner is called Andrea and not Andreas."
And what's wrong with more clarity?
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).
https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/118379/first-use...
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.
Isn't 'data' already plural, with 'datum' being the singular of the plural 'data'?
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)
* 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.
- 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.
Hearing someone talk about ‘codes’ has the same weird vibe as when they talk about ‘Legos’.
Also why not pluralise all words? Sources codes.
[1] https://www.lingalot.com/what-languages-did-albert-einstein-...
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?)
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.
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.
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.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euro_English#Inflection
informations (French) -> informations (English)
compétences -> competences
Do you also write "he's" and "she's" (as possessive pronouns)? No? Then it's "its".
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.
"Who?"
"Xtk'act'sbu"
"Oh no, not the Klingon cosplayer!"
-> it's putting the lotion on its skin
> ...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.
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...
https://faculty.georgetown.edu/jod/texts/twain.html
[edit] Maybe Twain, anyway. The attribution is dubious, but common.
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.
> 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"
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.
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).
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.
> 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.
https://www.webpages.uidaho.edu/~sflores/KlagesPostmodernism...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singular_they
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.
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.
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.
They weren't recognizing genderless people just because they used "they" when the gender was unknown ;)
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."
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.
There's no virtue signalling, you're reading too much into it.
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.
The person you responded to is right. If you start mixing in "they" you're just confusing the listener, because they will assume you're now talking about some different people. I wouldn't have the patience to listen to somebody who speaks in that matter and deliberately makes their words cryptic.
I thought this was just a difference between American and British English.
> * 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
> * 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.
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'.
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.
I think that's just a grammatical error that people (sometimes) make, and it isn't even specific to English.
Das/Der/Die is a constant source of frustration. Its never easy to remember.
CZ: ten nůž (masc.) - DE: das Messer (neutr.) - EN: knife
CZ: ten svět (masc.) - DE: die Welt (fem.) - EN: world
CZ: ta žába (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.
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
Тази вечер
even though in the greeting "good evening", the old masculine form remains:
добър вечер
Bulgarian in general seems to be the Chad of the Slavic language family :)
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.
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").
That should solve all spelling problems forever. :)))
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. hrană is [ˈxra.nə] even though people think they say [ˈhra.nə]
* 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 /koˈpi.iʲ/ . In the past /j/ and /ʲ/ were written with ĭ making things a bit easier.
* Stress is not written which causes confusions between words like "muie" /mu'je/ (softened) and "muie" /'muje/ (blowjob)
* /ɨ/is written as both î and â based on some stupid rule to preserve România being writen as România instead of Romînia. 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.
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 љ and nj for њ), they are unambiguous - there's no contrast between "lj" and "l" followed by "j", unlike say Russian where you need to distinguish between "лёд" and "льёт" somehow.
If you want no digraphs at all, Serbian and Montenegrin Cyrillic is still not ideal because "дз" is a digraph. Macedonian fixes it by using the historical Cyrillic "ѕ" [д]зело 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 "ь" for palatalization of consonants you can also repurpose the "soft" vowels to indicate fronting of vowels specifically.
But they are very different, no?) I'd think mistaking "лёд" for "йод" is easier.
In general, what's perceived as "very different" or not is very subjective based on what one is used to. E.g. the distinction between "v" and "w" is very significant in English, but for speakers of many Slavic languages, those are allophones, and when they learn English they have trouble using them correctly.
Same for `chuáng` 床（） vs `chuán` （船）。
Russian has terminal de-voicing; so /d/ softens to a /t/, hence сад = /sat/. (Sort of; actually it's something in between, but the shift is noticable).
And /l/ palatizes (becomes /lj/) before both е and ё, as in самолёт. (Actually the /j/ is built into ё of course, but somehow it seems helpful to recognize the commonality of the sounds when realized after /l/ - basically е becomes more yoff-like).
The vowel might differ (one may be more fronted or rounded than the other), but that tends to vary among speakers anyway.
Russian has a whole suite of secondary rules like this. Ukrainian by contrast is much more phonetic. But unlike English, at least Russian has a system.
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.
J`st ch`nge `m t` di`cr`t'c m`rks, `nd `t's st`ll p`rf`ctl` l`g`ble
Seriously, who cares that some organizational body in Germany has an issue with the English language? :)