168
Germans decry influence of English as ‘idiot’s apostrophe’ gets official approval
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 08 Oct 2024
168 points (95.7% liked)
Europe
1554 readers
532 users here now
News and information from Europe 🇪🇺
(Current banner: La Mancha, Spain. Feel free to post submissions for banner images.)
Rules (2024-08-30)
- This is an English-language community. Comments should be in English. Posts can link to non-English news sources when providing a full-text translation in the post description. Automated translations are fine, as long as they don't overly distort the content.
- No links to misinformation or commercial advertising. When you post outdated/historic articles, add the year of publication to the post title. Infographics must include a source and a year of creation; if possible, also provide a link to the source.
- Be kind to each other, and argue in good faith. Don't post direct insults nor disrespectful and condescending comments. Don't troll nor incite hatred. Don't look for novel argumentation strategies at Wikipedia's List of fallacies.
- No bigotry, sexism, racism, antisemitism, dehumanization of minorities, or glorification of National Socialism.
- Be the signal, not the noise: Strive to post insightful comments. Add "/s" when you're being sarcastic (and don't use it to break rule no. 3).
- If you link to paywalled information, please provide also a link to a freely available archived version. Alternatively, try to find a different source.
- Light-hearted content, memes, and posts about your European everyday belong in !yurop@lemm.ee. (They're cool, you should subscribe there too!)
- Don't evade bans. If we notice ban evasion, that will result in a permanent ban for all the accounts we can associate with you.
- No posts linking to speculative reporting about ongoing events with unclear backgrounds. Please wait at least 12 hours. (E.g., do not post breathless reporting on an ongoing terror attack.)
(This list may get expanded when necessary.)
We will use some leeway to decide whether to remove a comment.
If need be, there are also bans: 3 days for lighter offenses, 14 days for bigger offenses, and permanent bans for people who don't show any willingness to participate productively. If we think the ban reason is obvious, we may not specifically write to you.
If you want to protest a removal or ban, feel free to write privately to the mods: @federalreverse@feddit.org, @poVoq@slrpnk.net, or @anzo@programming.dev.
founded 4 months ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
First off, a) Standard German is not a language that's spoken anywhere in the country in the first place, not even at the Tagesschau studios. It's a solely literary language, defined somewhat semi-democratically by book and newspaper editors and b) this is about orthography, not language qua language.
This is not about telling people whether they should say "ich bin am gehen" or "ich bin gehend" -- both are incorrect in Standard Geman, the reason it doesn't have a present progressive is that people couldn't agree which form to use, and the different forms are quite far apart. So it's avoided by editors, hence it's not part of the language, "ich gehe gerade" is used instead which is (IMNSHO) unnatural but also not terribly awkward. That kind of thing is way more at odds with how people actually speak than orthography, and accepted without second thought: Because Standard German is a Dachsprache. If I want to talk to a Bavarian, compromises will have to be made.
Then, an orthography has to be, and this might be surprising to Anglophones, one thing: Logical and predictable, inferrable from how you speak and what things mean. The idiot's apostrophe is not. It makes no sense, it follows no rule. If I say "gehn" then I can infer, from a uniform rule, that I should write "gehen" -- because folks in the south say "gehe", and well a compromise is when noone is happy. But using a different rule for "the dog's bone" and "Jane's bar"? There's no justification for that. None. It introduces a distinction where there's none.
The issue I have with this whole thing isn't that it seems to be influenced by English, the issue I have is that it makes as much sense as English orthography.
As the commenter above you said, people use language differently than how formal rules describe. Is it a kind of capitulation for a formal rules body to change in response? Yes, probably. But so what? If someone doesn't like it take it up with the general population.
As you might have gleaned from my comment, everyone uses language differently. Very differently. Scots vs. English kind of differently and that's not even covering all autochthone minorities. To make sure the whole country has a way to understand each other we need to agree on a standard that's half-way acceptable and half-way convenient to everyone. In setting that standard, why should we follow the practices of simple but bold businessmen ("Lara's hair stylez") over newspapers. One knows stuff about hair and not so much language, the other knows quite a bit about language and less about hair. Why are we asking plumbers how to bake bread and bakers how to fix faucets. Explain it to me.
Some questions: Is it your position that people can't understand each other when using this apostrophe? Are you saying that only business people use this apostrophe? And are you saying that the only people who can be trusted to correctly use language are those at newspapers?
No, no, and no.
The question is whether what's understood as the standard is set by bowing to random influence from people being careless or plain uninformed, or by reference to how people specialising in the thing do it.
This whole thing is just a declaration of bankruptcy on part of the standards body because the natural authorities of the language -- and that's editors, not barkeeps -- will not be adopting this one. They also prevented some details about the 1996 spelling reform, while adopting the rest: In the end it was the reform that bent to the editors, not the editors bending to the standards body.
You're talking about "But shouldn't randos be free to choose how they spell things" -- yes, and they are. And the rest of the republic is free to consider that usage wrong, especially if those randos didn't choose a spelling, but simply didn't care. The standards body saying "hey shouldn't this be right" has no authority over the opinion of the rest of the republic we're not in France.