Germans decry influence of English as ‘idiot’s apostrophe’ gets official approval

[Piethagoram 𝕏 @piethagoram]

One for @DangerousSausage to comment...

Germans decry influence of English as ‘idiot’s apostrophe’ gets official approval | Germany | The Guardian

WWW.THEGUARDIAN.COM

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Linguistic body has relaxed rules on use of apostrophe to show possession, not traditionally correct in German

 

[Robbie 𝕏 @Robbie_NCFC]

Every language goes through a linguistic evolution over time. I would have thought the German language is no different.

Lots of languages have influences from other languages. 

The full stop, and semi colon are familiar to the majority of written languages, why not the apostrophe?

If you listen to the Indian languages such as Urdu, there are lots of English words incorporated into that language.

English, has become the World language of choice, so there is no surprise that English influences will spread into different European languages, such as German.

I also think social media will push linguistic evolution around the World at an ever increasing rate. You even hear the occasional English word in Chinese, Japanese & Korean when they speak.

 

[DangerousSausage]

Yeah, we discussed this at work a while back. It doesn't really make a lot of sense as it can be used in the context of shop and business names but not in ordinary speech - so Rosi's Bar is now correct, but Rosi's Familie is still wrong although the apostrophe denotes ownership in both cases. Make it make sense.

Another problem is how it is used. Many Germans who love to drop in Anglicisms often do so incorrectly. Most also have no idea where the apostrophe key is on keyboards - on German keyboards it's on the hashtag key, but the key to the left of the backspace has something that looks very much like an apostrophe. However, it's actually used for French accents. So many people here would write Rosi´s Bar instead of Rosi's Bar (trust me, it looks pig ugly when you're not writing on a forum).

All languages evolve @Robbie, but many of the "evolutions" in Germany are decided by a committee in a pretty arbitrary and wrong-headed way. One example is gender-neutral nouns, which are normally used in the plural. The problem is that the female form is slightly different - the male form of "the student" is "der Student", while for women it is "die Studentin". The plural - "die Studenten" - is therefore assumed to be male because of the lack of an "in" suffix. So over the past few years we have had various attempts at constructing plural forms that are gender-neutral, each stranger than the last - StudentInnen (yes that's a capital I), Student*innen and the current flavour of the month, Studierenden ("those who study"). They could just abolish the female form like we did in English (does anyone still say manageress or directress?) and use the same word for everyone, but that would be far too simple...