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Germans decry influence of English as ‘idiot’s apostrophe’ gets official approval
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 08 Oct 2024
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Language is democratic. If people are starting to speak or write in a certain way, that is the correct way to use a language. I know that we have all these organizations trying to define "correct" language use, but if many Germans are deciding that they want to use this apostrophe, that should be correct.
And there is another issue: There are a lot of people looking down on people who can't read or write correctly. You can see this here: people are calling other people itiots just because they are using an apostrophe in a not officially accepted way. Which should never, never happen
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.
What is your opinion on people using "would of" instead of "would have"?
I don't think that accepting the lowest common denominator or following the tyrrany of majority is particularly democratic, when it's clearly destroying the meaning of the language.
Sure, so let's say we accept it, but then how do we teach children these new rules? It'll only result in further degradation of the language because nobody knows what is right or wrong anymore.
Well for starters, kids aren't going to whinge about it- they're just going to use it, generally correctly for their setting.
Headlines when a royal family kid is bilingual, every day regular-ass survival when a poor border town kid does it, unprompted.
I mean, the royal kids totally would of got it on their own, right?
Aren’t royals supposed to be bilingual? Like, that’s part of their job
There was one royal kid-a girl- who learned spanish.
It made headlines.
I assume her accent is so bad as to be largely unintelligible to most spanish speaking folks.
They have translators.
Border kids learn both on their own or they starve
Seems pretty straightforward... Teach it like we always have, and then just add a quick, "the traditional contraction expands into, 'should have,' but recently, 'should of' has become popular colloquially despite the apparent error."
Or something like that, I don't know. It's not like English doesn't already have a billion exceptions to every single rule. What's one more slang term?
Do I like it? Fuck no. It sounds/looks bad, and I will probably silently judge you if you say or write it lol
What's popular is what's correct. We get it.
That's why the language is evolving based on influencers, people too stupid to KNOW the syntax guiding the path forward.
Nice going.
So what is the proper thing to do when someone's comment is completely unintelligible to me? The lack of punctuation and using the wrong version of there/their/they're, to/too, etc. often makes for sentences I can't even begin to make sense of. They see no problem with it, and other people seem to have no issue parsing it, so asking for clarification usually just gets the same response as being a mean about it, in my experience.
There are ways to ask for clarification without coming across as patronizing or condescending...
You don't even necessarily need to be overly polite about it. Why not just, "What does that even mean? Can you clarify?" or maybe just, "Your comment is unclear."
If they refuse to clarify... then yeah condescend away.
I know I can be guilty of mocking people making stupid arguments using horrendous grammar, but that's more about the content of their arguments... If they weren't literal fascists, I would have no problem being more courteous when pointing out nonsensical comments.
I don't think language is entirely beholden to democracy. Contrary to the beliefs of ~~pedants~~ English teachers, I think we are each empowered to utilize it how we wish, without concern for any broader consensus.
For example, I have unilaterally deprecated "its".
Following normal grammatical rules, "+s" indicates plurality, not possession. "Its" violates this rule.
The "+'s" construction is used to indicate both contraction (with "is" or "was") and possession. "It's" follows either set of rules, depending on context. There is no significant risk of ambiguity between the two meanings. "It's" is a perfectly cromulent homonym for both meanings.
As there is no need for a plural form of an inherently singular word, "its" is no longer a word.
It's: the exception that proves the rule.
Exceptions disprove rules.
Hey what flavour is that paste?