A relaxation of official rules around the correct use of apostrophes in German has not only irritated grammar sticklers but triggered existential fears around the pervasive influence of English.
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.
We should ship them some of ours – soon relax that rule again, no?
Now I’m just curious about Veronika and her mysterious affinity with asparagus.
“recent” viral hit? Barbara’s Barbarian Rhubarb Bar has been around for decades.
Ve haff vay’s of making you write proper.
When did English stop using a capital for the first letter in nouns? There’s been so much verbing of Nouns and nouning of Verbs that I sometimes need to read a headline twice to see its meaning.
Don’t think english ever has, has it dearieme? Except in the noun for languages. And I think that’s probably recent. Early documents in english are remarkably scant on capitals.
I wonder if that’s because hand written english was derived directly from latin & french, whereas printed english was influenced by the first printers who were dutch. Who were the bastards who regularised our spelling. Capitalised general nouns start regularly turning up in the C16th? Or C17th?
dearieme
When did English stop using a capital for the first letter in nouns? There’s been so much verbing of Nouns and nouning of Verbs that I sometimes need to read a headline twice to see its meaning.
Your question got me thinking and I thought it might have something to do with the links to the German language, which it turns out it does, at least according to ChatGPT:
You will note, I have personally abjured capitalising both languages & nationalities in accordance with my policy of adopting the customs of the countries I live in. Something I would recommend, probably hopelessly, to all Brits.
@BiS: dear God, you’ll be burning Protestants next.
“official rules around the correct use of apostrophes”
And this, children, is why we aren’t Foreign.
Something amuses me about apostrophes. I contribute to an international discussion forum concerns itself with about 90% of the world. However the platform it uses has an entirely US English language base. I don’t whether this is a spelling/grammar autocorrect phenomenon or something in the HTML But it is completely incapable of handling apostrophes in anything other than as used in US English. For instance type Coq d’Or for the name of a restaurant & it will render Coq THE Or, when submitted. How it gets THE from d’ I haven”t a clue. Or why it capitalises. There are several other similar anomalies surrounding various letters & diacritics. So it makes it impossible or at least very difficult to write about France, for example.
BiS
… in accordance with my policy of adopting the customs of the countries I live in…
Is that true in Spain? In Spanish America they scatter capital letters over text like bloody confetti and then complain when your English translation doesn’t do the same.
No capital letters for anything except proper nouns and the first word in a sentence. And that’s it.
This is even more amusing. After writing the above I had a brainwave. I use a US International keyboard, which has two apostrophes, one off the AltGr key. So I tried the other one. Still produces ‘the’ from d’ but now in lower case.
Anyone here understand this?
Bugger apostrophes; I use too many commas. What to do?
@Bloke in Callao
The Spanish seem rather frugal with their capitals. Most of my friends here are SA’s but light on peruanas.* Haven’t noticed them being particularly profligate. But I doubt if many of them have anything better than basic school education. Especially going by their spelling. The B/V errors amongst others.
*Don’t know why that is. I think I’ve only met two. The economics of Peru? Or Peruvians don’t admit to being Peruvians? Like Ecuadorans or Bolivians are reluctant. There seems to be a considerable Peruvian community in Madrid. Enough to have a sort of Peruvian quarter of restaurants we eat in, when there. Big fans of Peruvian nosh, we are.
Some forum software has a list of phrases that it will automatically convert to other phrases. Usually a naughty word fixer but can be set up to do anything.
You could try using any of: ‘'’ or ‘'’ or ‘’’ or ‘’’ – one might get past the filter.
Bugger. The middle two were ‘& # 39;’ and ‘& # 8217;’ without the spaces. It looked fine in the preview!
No, I’ve tried that BiW. It doesn’t seem to recognise ASCII.
Usually a naughty word fixer
Oh, it certainly does that. But only for words a certain sort of Yank would find naughty. It ignores anything else.
From recalling experimenting with it, there seem to be some specific letters bother upper & lower, it doesn’t like with a space either side. And it will treat an apostrophe in conjunction with those letters as a space. How it gets from “D” to “THE” I haven’t a clue. I even wondered for a while if it was treating d as þ or ð for “th”. But even Yanks can’t be that archaic
Oh I since I use a US International keyboard, where there’s 3 different apostrophes available using AltGR, it doesn’t like any of them.
BiW
to do the opposite you can put a text through
https://pornolize.com/
ASCII?
Unicode, Bis, unicode.
Unless it’s running on old IBM kit, in which case you’ll have to brush up on your EBCDIC.
You’ve gone way past my paygrade DMcD. But I doubt it is what it’s running on. Maybe what it was running on when the coding was done by dinosaurs, just before the extinction event.
I suspect the people managing the site these days understand about as much as I do. They’ve just carried on doing whatever the bloke started did. I’ve tried asking & never received a reply.
Nothing very recherché about unicode – use the character map on a windows machine to explore the range.