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Germans Decry Influence of English As 'Idiot's Apostrophe' Gets Official Approval (theguardian.com) 284

A recent relaxation of rules around apostrophes in German, permitting their use in possessive forms like "Eva's Blumenladen," has sparked criticism from traditionalists and concerns over the influence of English on the German language. The Guardian reports: Establishments that feature their owners' names, with signs like "Rosi's Bar" or "Kati's Kiosk" are a common sight around German towns and cities, but strictly speaking they are wrong: unlike English, German does not traditionally use apostrophes to indicate the genitive case or possession. The correct spelling, therefore, would be "Rosis Bar," "Katis Kiosk," or, as in the title of a recent viral hit, Barbaras Rhabarberbar. However, guidelines issued by the body regulating the use of Standard High German orthography have clarified that the use of the punctuation mark colloquially known as the Deppenapostroph ("idiot's apostrophe") has become so widespread that it is permissible -- as long as it separates the genitive 's' within a proper name.

The new edition of the Council for German Orthography's style guide, which prescribes grammar use at schools and public bodies in Germany, 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. 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"). The new set of rules came into effect in July, and the council said a loosening of the rules in 1996 meant that "Rosi's Bar" had strictly speaking not been incorrect for almost three decades. Yet over the past few days, German newspapers and social media networks have seen a pedants' revolt against the loosening of grammar rules.

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Germans Decry Influence of English As 'Idiot's Apostrophe' Gets Official Approval

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  • by viperidaenz ( 2515578 ) on Monday October 07, 2024 @09:19PM (#64847053)

    Make den der das and die all interchangeable, itâ(TM)s confusing trying to learn German as a native English speaker.
    Why do words need genders?

    • by shoor ( 33382 )

      We could do away with a lot of baggage in English too. Why have fly flew flown when we could have fly flied flied. I remember hearing about a radio sportscaster saying some hitter 'flied out', that is, hit a fly ball that was caught. So, just make fly as in what airplanes do be the same as fly when hitting a fly ball. And do the same for all the other strong verbs, like swim, see, run, etc. Oh, and why put an s after a verb in 3rd person singular, make it I run, you run, he run, they run.

      Lerners of Eng

    • by RightwingNutjob ( 1302813 ) on Monday October 07, 2024 @09:37PM (#64847077)

      Why do words need genders?

      Oh the many reasons:
      1. Because they've always had gender.
      2. To add a little spice to puns, jokes, and other wordplay.
      3. The best reason of all: to piss off the gender-weirdos in the Anglosphere.

      • by ArmoredDragon ( 3450605 ) on Monday October 07, 2024 @11:10PM (#64847225)

        Well genders are painful. Or something.

        There are, of course, plenty of people—including many women—who have no problem being addressed as “guys,” think the word has evolved to be entirely gender-neutral, and don't see a reason to change their usage. But others aren’t so sure.

        ...

        In my reporting I heard from several people who said that the word is particularly troubling for trans and gender-nonconforming people. “As a transgender woman, I consciously began trying to stop using guys some years ago,” says Brad Ward, a college counselor at a high school in Atherton, California. She added, “When I’m included with a group that is called guys, there’s some pain, since it takes me back to my male days in a way that I’d rather not go.”

        https://web.archive.org/web/20... [archive.org]

        Doesn't matter how you use language or what your intentions are. People who want to be offended will find a way to be offended by it. Being oppressed is a virtue now, get with the times dude.

        • by will4 ( 7250692 ) on Monday October 07, 2024 @11:25PM (#64847243)

          If English is sanitized, cleaned up, de-cluttered, or simplified how will the media write articles which

          - use softening language if a crime is committed by a media favored person or group
          - use incendiary language if a crime is committed by a person or group hated by the media

          Two quotes from - https://www.worthwhileconsulti... [worthwhileconsulting.com]
          The dangers of “softening language”

          "For example, Ghislaine M is often described as “sourcing” girls who were “abused.” This softening language does not accurately frame her (alleged) crimes the way “sex trafficking” and “raped” does. It makes her actions seem less intense, less concrete, less horrible."

          "Softening language is often used to humanize wrongdoers, and shift the focus from their harmful impact to compassion for their experience. It is a subtle mechanism to maintain current power structures and avoid accountability."

          This last point is important because the media is doing a lazy disservice by whitewashing via softening words one political party, one gender, one X group and not any other groups. Suggestion here is that they report the facts trying to use equal language regardless of the incident, group or person involved. ...

          • I remember reading a news article where the reporter's kid learned the definition for the word 'pelt' as 'to throw something which hits a person'.

            The news article then went on to mention that pelt also means animal skin, as in a beaver pelt, which had importance in the settling of Canada and the USA.

            Is this were it's headed, where inconvenient words and inconvenient word definitions are systemically removed from what is taught in schools, appropriate for work conversations, in the media and books?

            Words do g

        • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

          It's just historic context. In the UK blokes talk about their "mates" who are just male friends, but biologists use the term to describe a reproductive partner. Maybe it has something to do with a ship's mate.

          At the same time they would be very upset if you referred to them as a "girl", even though that word used to be gender neutral long ago.

          It's not new, and it's not some special thing that some group you have issues with just invented. Gender is a big part of society and a bit part of many people's ident

    • Gender articles can change the meaning of a word.
    • by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 07, 2024 @09:39PM (#64847083)

      itâ(TM)s

      Ah... a classic case of the idiot's apostrophe.

      • by sk999 ( 846068 )

        +1

      • A classic case of apple keyboard.

        • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

          by nicubunu ( 242346 )

          "idiot" and "apple user"... why are you redundant?

          • Android stagnated and split and I got sick of short software support
            Pixels are problematic, both buggy software and hardware
            Samsung has a terrible "one ui" bloated on top and forces their own store down your throat
            Motorola went down the toilet
            Fairphone already had old hardware when it was released
            I'm glad I didn't get a Nothing Phone, they seem to have completely abandoned it now they have a Phone 2

            So after 10 years of Android I switched to iOS, because the alternatives suck.

    • itâ(TM)s very confusing to me

    • Incormation coding (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Okian Warrior ( 537106 ) on Monday October 07, 2024 @10:19PM (#64847147) Homepage Journal

      Why do words need genders?

      They clearly don't (viz: English), but can be used for denser information coding.

      A language can have few words and encode a larger number of meanings using stems such as masculine and feminine.

      To take a synthetic example, you could have a numeric stem to indicate size of a (piece of) wood: the word for twig would be "one-wood", branch is "two-wood", limb is "three-wood", and trunk/log could be "four-wood". Applying the numeric stem to words allows multiple concepts to be encoded in fewer words.

      Gendered nouns operate the same way - it lets people communicate more meanings using fewer words. In information theory, it would be considered a more dense encoding.

      Italian: La capitale (= the city that is the official center of government of a country) / il capitale (= large amount of money)

      English is a bit odd, right around the year 1000 the Normans settled on the coast of England, and the Saxons were the original inhabitants, and the two cultures needed to communicate for trade and such, so they both learned the basics of each others' languages. Any person (either side) only learned the basics of the other language, only what was needed for trade, and the result was a sort of new, simpler system, and English grew out of that. (Fact check me if I've gotten this wrong.)

      So basically, English as a language is a) fairly new, and b) started as a simpler language used by two cultures to communicate for trade.

      • But there are no rules to say which word is which gender.

        You just need to learn it for each word.
        Why is a fork masculine and a spoon feminine?
        Gabel and LÃffel

        Why are cows and pigs feminine but goats and chickens are masculine?

      • by cstacy ( 534252 )

        You could have a numeric stem to indicate size of a (piece of) wood: the word for twig would be "one-wood", branch is "two-wood", limb is "three-wood" and "four-wood"

        Conversely, you could add even more words
        such as "Fleegle", "Bingo", "Drooper", and "Snorky".

        This idea is giving me four-wood.
        Also I want an ice cream dessert for some reason.
        La La La, la-la-la La!

      • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 ) on Tuesday October 08, 2024 @05:26AM (#64847689) Homepage Journal

        Sometimes I wonder how this sort of thing affects the way people think and listen.

        In Japanese they don't have gendered pronouns, and generally speaking the language is quite efficient. When people speak they often omit a lot of context words that English speakers wouldn't. The result is faster communication (speed-runners often play the Japanese version of a game because the dialogue is shorter), but also a need to concentrate and follow what is being said more carefully than in English. Your brain has to do more work.

        They also describe things "zoom in", where as English is "zoom out". In English you would say "I read Slashdot on the train yesterday", starting with the action and then giving it context, where as in Japanese you would effectively be saying "yesterday, on the train, Slashdot, I read". Start with the wider picture and zoom in.

        It has an effect on how people think about things, but it's hard to describe what it is. Once you start studying non-European languages you realize that there are fundamentally different ways of understanding the world, like the Japanese concept of animate and inanimate, or how they use verbs to describe state where we would use an adjective.

    • When I try to speak German, I use die for everything, as in my first language. English actually harks back to Frissian - Friesland is on the border between Nederland and Germany. So if the Germans blame English, they are actually blaming themselves.
    • Because the gender allows your brain to ingest more information with a single word. It's like a word metadata. Enriches information and provides clarity. Just because you don't like genders (for political reasons, I presume?) doesn't mean that everyone else would like to have a dumbed-down, bland language, too. In fact, most Indo-European, South American and Norther-African languages are gendered.

      • by JustOne ( 1309655 ) on Tuesday October 08, 2024 @02:38AM (#64847457)
        Grammatical gender has, in the vast majority of cases, nothing to do with biological sex and is merely an arbitrary piece of metadata that must be remembered in order to write or speak a language correctly (not to mention also needing to know and remember exceptions, e.g. agricula). That is not enrichment or more-densely encoding useful information. You're attempting to turn a legitimate criticism of needless complexity into something about identity politics.
    • The same reason as for any grammar rules, to reduce ambiguity. The garden path sentence "the horse raced past the barn fell" wouldn't work in German, among other reasons because the barn (die Scheune) is feminine, while the horse (das Pferd) is neutral. English is actually a weirdo among the Indo-European languages for having lost the grammatical gender. In fact, of all the IE languages in Europe it is the only one without.

  • I assume that there's greater symbolic value when the official standards nerds throw in the towel; but it seems like a really bad time to kick up a fuss. Official language regulation bodies are typically reactionary lagging indicators, even changes they approve of take a while to hammered out and written up and there's generally no requirement that they acquiesce to those crazy kids and their slang talk.

    If it has reached the point where the RdR has gone with a "fine, do apostrophes" position German speak
  • I've nver seen 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").

    It's always been potatoes.

  • by Tony Isaac ( 1301187 ) on Monday October 07, 2024 @09:54PM (#64847105) Homepage

    English speaker's don't know how to use apostrophe's either!

  • In spite of the fact that far too many native-English-speakers make a lot of cringe-worthy mistakes, English doesn't assign gender to inanimate objects. Checkmate.

    • With some exceptions like "ship".

      • With some exceptions like "ship".

        Well it's more we don't assign gender to nouns. We do sometimes assign gender to instances of nouns: usually humans, often animals (though this is increasingly going out of fashion, I'm sure animals are now more often "it" than in my childhood), occasionally ships.

        Though these days if you refer to a ship as "she", you sound old fashioned and faintly piratical.

  • by Mspangler ( 770054 ) on Monday October 07, 2024 @10:11PM (#64847129)

    English is German with a French overlay. The other overlay is Norse, which is also German.

    Talk about the pot calling the kettle black.

  • by davidwr ( 791652 ) on Monday October 07, 2024 @10:14PM (#64847135) Homepage Journal

    Ze drem vil finali kum tru. [upenn.edu]
    Linguistic humor, English spelling reform
    Source: An old chestnut. In its globalized incarnation below, via Steven Gearhart.
    English in the Future

    Directors at Daimler Benz and Chrysler have announced an agreement to adopt English as the preferred language for communications, rather than German, which was another possibility.

    As part of the negotiations, directors at Chrysler conceded that English spelling has some room for improvement and have accepted a five-year phase-in plan. In the first year, "s" will be used instead of the soft "c". Also, the hard "c" will be replased with "k". Not only will this klear up konfusion, but komputers have one less letter.

    There will be growing kompany enthusiasm in the sekond year when the troublesome "ph" will be replased by "f". This will make words like "fotograf" 20 persent shorter.

    In the third year, DaimlerKhrysler akseptanse of the new spelling kan be expekted to reash the stage where more komplikated shanges are possible.

    DaimlerKhrysler will enkourage the removal of double letters, whish have always ben a deterent to akurate speling. Also, al wil agre that the horible mes of silent "e"'s in the languag is disgrasful, and they would go.

    By the fourth year, peopl wil be reseptiv to steps sush as replasing "th" with "z" and "w" by "v".

    During ze fifz year, ze unesesary "o" kan be droped from vords kontaining "o", and similar shanges vud of kors be aplid to ozer kombinations of leters.

    After zis fifz yer, ve vil hav a reli sensibl riten styl. Zer vil be no mor trubls or difikultis, and employes vil find it ezi to kommunikat viz eash ozer.

    Ov kors al supliers vil be expekted to us zis for all busines komunikation via DaimlerKhrysler.

    Ze drem vil finali kum tru.

  • by Roger W Moore ( 538166 ) on Monday October 07, 2024 @10:21PM (#64847149) Journal
    It's interesting that Germans are complaining that this is "corrupting" their language when English itself got the 's' for possession from the Old English practice of adding -es to denote the genitive (the 'e' then got replaced by the apostrophe). Old English was a Germanic language derived from earlier West German languages. So, arguably, this "corruption" originated in Germany. If the Saxons had not invaded Roman Britain bringing with them their early Germanic language we'd probably never have this way of denoting possession.

    So don't think of this as corrupting german, it's a feature improvement from the original that we came up with after almost 2,000 years of patches!
    • Fun as a trivia fact, but those people were a few thousand illiterate, bedraggled barbarians running away from other illiterate, bedraggled barbarians to another coast where they found better crops and discovered that the native illiterate, bedraggled barbarians were a bit softer than them. That's not a real origin story. Our language just happened, like most things.
  • Weirdos speaking other European languages: "Aaahhh, not English, our pure mother tongue must go untainted!"
    English regarding any other language, slang, or new word whatsoever: "We'll take it."
  • News for Nerds? That's a big 10-4, good buddy.

  • by piojo ( 995934 ) on Monday October 07, 2024 @10:49PM (#64847205)

    I thought the "idiot's apostrophe" would be "it's" for possession (or lack thereof for the contraction), as in: "The dog licked it's paw". Intuitively this actually makes some sense, as it's parallel to "Spot's paw". But native English speakers might not realize the division is clear: possessive nouns have an apostrophe, while possessive pronouns ("his", "hers", "mine") do not.

    Why don't verbs date pronouns? Because the pronouns can get possessive. Also, it gets expensive.

  • Hey! (Score:5, Funny)

    by PPH ( 736903 ) on Monday October 07, 2024 @10:59PM (#64847213)

    It should be the idiots' apostrophe. Not the idiot's apostrophe. There's more than one of us.

  • Back when they did away with the double-s character 'ÃY' or removing a third 's' in a row in a compound word.

  • Germans have a better chance at understanding Old English than Modern English speakers do.
  • Excuse my French, but the Deutschen volks' schadenfreude is like France's own "grammar Geheime Staatspolizei" as described:

    https://www.languagemagazine.c... [languagemagazine.com]

    An interesting video about how English lost genders is...

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]

    Progress as German evolves...???

    JoshK.

  • I wonder what they call someone in Germany who is a stickler for correct grammar?!
  • by devslash0 ( 4203435 ) on Tuesday October 08, 2024 @02:11AM (#64847423)

    You'll let you drop the apostrophe if you introduce spaces in your language.

  • by 93 Escort Wagon ( 326346 ) on Tuesday October 08, 2024 @02:38AM (#64847459)

    If you feel you need to formally protect your language via legislation or via some other official manner... you've already lost the battle.

  • by Rosco P. Coltrane ( 209368 ) on Tuesday October 08, 2024 @02:53AM (#64847481)

    to make them mad:

    Modern English is derived from Anglo-Saxon. It's the version of German that has evolved.

    And then if they're not mad enough, I tell them I speak Dutch, which is exactly like German but without the needlessly complicated grammar (added bonus: this also makes the Dutch mad).

    • by Teun ( 17872 )
      As a native Dutch speaker I have seen enough foreigners having trouble with Dutch grammar finding out the Dutch themselves barely understand the rules...
      At school during German classes we were presented the sentence "Der Zug donnerte vorüber".
      Some smart ass translated it as "De zeug donderde voorover".
      I leave the solution to those speaking or understanding both languages :)
  • by GeekWithAKnife ( 2717871 ) on Tuesday October 08, 2024 @03:01AM (#64847495)
    I would argue that to preserve the true nature of native language we should only use organic paint in our caves and continue with grunting instead of words. It's very important to protect traditions because we might lose our sense of identity if we just started changing stuff...now where's my hunting spear, I've got a three day journey to the savannah - plains I'm hungry.
  • by ControlFreal ( 661231 ) <niek.bergboer@net> on Tuesday October 08, 2024 @03:11AM (#64847501) Journal

    Shakes cane, "when I was a boy", etc....

    In Dutch, this has become the thing people do now as well. Being a Germanic sister language of German, Dutch also does/should not use the apostrophe in this sense, but people do it anyway. Then again, a language is a living thing, and in the end, it is what people speak and write. I can live with this.

  • by twocows ( 1216842 ) on Tuesday October 08, 2024 @08:19AM (#64848075)
    From a bit of brief research, it seems like the Council for German Orthography is an organization that merely tries to standardize the sorts of changes that are already happening in common usage. If that's the case, German appears to be closer to English than to French on the continuum of democratized versus guided, where the ultimate basis for the language is how most people speak and write it rather than how some organization says it is to be defined. If that is indeed the case, the traditionalists can cry to the Council about the influence of English all they want, ultimately it is those who speak and write the language who they need to be appealing to.

    In situations like this, what usually determines the ultimate fate of a change like this is whether it's actually useful or not. Changes that aren't useful usually fall off over time and changes that are tend to stick. I don't know anything about German, but if their plural and possessive forms work similarly to ours, a change this like this would make it more immediately obvious whether a word or name is intended to be plural or possessive. That's useful and it's the kind of change that would probably stick.

    Just to illustrate my point, in American English, each generation has a lot of unique slang. The vast majority of that falls out of common use over time because it's not really adding anything, it's just different for the sake of being different. However, occasionally some of these words or phrases end up actually being useful for one reason or another and will actually stick. It would be kind of silly to complain about one of these being an "incorrect use of English" because English is defined by its use and if the word or phrase is in widespread use, it becomes valid usage. It seems like the Council for German Orthography operates in a similar capacity to e.g. Webster, where it notes the sorts of changes that are already happening and tries to standardize them across various different dialects so the language doesn't become overly fragmented. If I'm understanding it correctly, complaining about the "influence of English" to them would be like complaining to Webster about whatever new slang breaks through to the mainstream.
  • by LostMyBeaver ( 1226054 ) on Tuesday October 08, 2024 @11:09PM (#64850301)
    The people dictate language.

    To this day the Norwegian government requires all children to learn and pass exams on two different Norwegian languages. One is heavily influenced by 19th century Danish and formalized as a Norwegian language by a dimwit name Knut Knudsen then sold by Henrik Ibsen to the masses. The other engineered by a patriotic moron named Ivar &#197;sen. No one speaks the first one except snobs showing off. No one ever spoke the second and never will, it just a conglomerate of hillbilly nonsense in an effort to "identify ourselves though our inability to communicate with our neighbors".

    Today, spoken Norwegian is just whatever people want to make it and written Norwegian is fluid in the sense that it is whatever is most convenient for thumb typing. Emojis often carry more weight than words.

    Norwegians are more commonly speaking English with each other since TV is dying so children aren't learning dialects which vary greatly or learning Swedish which nearly all Norwegians who grew up with TV understand.

    Norwegian is dying since everyone has to learn English to travel, play games, or perform business. Also, young people don't buy into blind patriotism anymore. Only nutters like Americans think the conditions of which vagina in which country one was ejected from matters.

    That brings us to English. Why English?

    That's easy. English is less of a language than a language group. By having roots in Germanic, Saxon, Normon, Latin, and Norse, it is oddly compatible with over half the European languages. If we consider England as little more than the place where pikes of languages melted together and we just used the location that all these languages merged as its name since "Gersaxnorlatnor" would make a terrible name it would be accurate.

    English also has no authoritative body of significance. England lost all control if it, Especially when Meriem and Webster decided to formalize the written form of English in America to more accurately reflect "Yankee English". This means Americans say color, not colour as the brits do. Of course, this means languages like Singlish are entirely legitimate as well.

    So most importantly, English mutates rapidly. It is perfectly ok to speak English poorly. We'll figure it out :) Languages like Norwegian and German are zero tolerance. If your pronunciation doesn't meet a very high threshold, people will not understand you. Most people would rather just speak English than try to descramble their own language spoken badly.

    Any German authority who believes they can influence language should be fired for incompetence.

To communicate is the beginning of understanding. -- AT&T

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