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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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How’s it feel rest of the world? To have English seep into your language after so many centuries of only having your languages seep into English.
But for real, I get both sides here, apostrophic possession is nice, it’s convenient, it’s useful, and it’s foreign. I’m sure many Germans are mad, but it seems like it’s Germans doing the thing pissing them off.
French:
Although, aside from the great vowel shift, we gladly contributed at fucking up English orthography.
In German we simply add an s for the genitive, and we add an apostrophe when a letter is missing.
For example Jacob's book would be "Jakobs Buch" ¹ but John's book would be "Johannes' Buch", not "Johannes's Buch" ² and also not "Johannes'' Buch" ³.
¹ not "Jakob's Buch", which is called the "Deppenapostroph" - fool's apostrophe
² fool's apostrophe
³ fool's apostrophe and a second apostrophe to mark the cancelled letter
The genitive is nice, convenient and useful, yes. But there's no reason to add an apostrophe when no letter is missing.
(And as explained above, no, it is not foreign, this isn't changing anything in spoken language either, it's just a common spelling error due to commonly seeing it in English)
To draw a comparison regarding how annoying it is for anyone who cares about written language: It's quite similar to as if people in English suddenly started marking the plural with an apostrophe. Or if "would of" instead of "would have" would become correct.
Idk what to tell you, but when people start spelling things differently because they see it that way in a foreign language and think their language is the same that’s borrowing a grammatical rule from a foreign language. It starts by being wrong, then it becomes a common mistake, then an alternative rule, then eventually ya borrowed it. The mistake is the quantum component of natural evolution whether it’s DNA, language, or anything else self replicating.
We actually also do the apostrophe for when a letter is missing as well as the genitive. Probably got the former off y’all and nicked the latter from some other language. We speak frankenstein’s language after all.
Personally I have no say in this. When using German as a native English speaker my aim is to mimic and err on the side of more “correct”. If Germans keep making this mistake though some are bound to eventually make it a stylistic choice or do it because it’s natural to them.
So if many people (still a minority by a large margin of course) started writing things like "I would of visited the museum's today but I saw two rare bird's, their just so fascinating." it should become correct?
It's not like a majority is using apostrophes for the genitive in German. But since it's so easy to spot the few % of miswritten genitives just stand out.
If it's commonly understood, yes. That is how language works. Words change over time. Reading "would of" is jarring as fuck but it's also not really mistakable for anything other than would've.
So out of curiosity I found out how it happened in English and it’s dumber than I could’ve imagined. So yeah, idiots being wrong absolutely can eventually make it correct.