I'm mostly curious whether "Rosi's" and "Kati's" in the article are seen by Germans as intentionally trying to look "foreign", rather than the apostrophe "invading" German.
Like, if I go to a Sausage Haus, I'm not exactly worrying about "Haus" creeping into English to replace "House". Nor would I ever call it the "idiot's house" because that would be crazy insulting and perjorative.
There is a very ugly mix of German and English we call Denglish in German.
And there are many "English sounding" things that are not English or also a horrible mix up for marketing purposes.
E.g. Handy for smartphone. It doesn't look exotic, but English which is usually considered to be something modern.
And then there is a similar concept as the Idiotenapostroph which is the Deppenleerzeichen which is a space between combined words that are usually and famously not separated by space in correct German.
All those things are usually used in amateurish marketing and look just like that to the average German grammar enthusiast.
On the other hand especially in many professional fields English conquers the professional slang with gusto of the participants. A very hilarious take on such Denglish for software developers: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=c2V4bOL1jgM
We feel you over here in Sweden. Särskrivning (roughly “word splitting”) is a “problem” far greater than the apostrophes for us. Americentric Swedish Android keyboards are terrible offenders that happily splits words in two.
This is how language evolves nowadays. :/
If they train the predictive text function on swedish text, I don't know why it would do English-y things, and if they didn't train it on Swedish how does it work at all?
It's very surprising, and interesting, to me that this category of problem, in this particular context, is even possible
In German it also knows Computer and Tastatur, but I can’t use autocomplete to type Computertastatur.
Actually I just learned I can. Apparently this word is in the dictionary. But there are just so many compound nouns, it’s impossible for them all to be in the dictionary.
To make it work in such a language it has to understand about constructing compound nouns.
Also In Swedish splitting the words is many cases not incorrect, but just changes the meaning.
For example is Swedish an "English teacher" (Engelsk lärare) would be a teacher that is from England, while an "Englishteacher" is a teacher the teaches the subject English.
So "He is an English teacher" and "He is an Englishteacher" would both be valid sentences in Swedish, but the predictive text model seems to assume you wanted the first one.
Personally I think our "language culture" is overrated and I wouldn't care if Dutch just disappeared completely in favour of English.
It might have looked 'modern' (or rather progressive) seventy years ago (or thirty years ago in the east); these days using proper German seems rather backward, dated or borderline fascist.
It got pretty absurd over the last decades though. My parents were complaining about the bill they got from Telekom -- why in the world were 'Ferngespräche' listed there as 'long distance calls' in a text otherwise (near) German?
Now, I would love to see more English being used in Germany, particularly in official communication as there are plenty of people here who's first language isn't German. But why not both? It's not that much more work. Denglish however belongs strictly banned into the realm of comedy (recently I've seen a gas station advertizing its "Power Sauger" :))
For clarity, we already called them Handy when they were phones but not smart.
I guess it's different when you grew up with those words and internalized them.
The worst I ever saw was an advertisement on a bar telling prospective patrons about the availability of "snacks´s". This is so wrong I can't even figure out how many distinct errors were made. (And yes, that's an acute accent, not an apostrophe.)
In English I’m actually ok with it for single letters or abbreviations- “your writing uses a lot of x’s and y’s”, “Can you pack away the CD’s and DVD’s”, but this is a personal quirk and definitely non-standard usage.
For whatever reason, it drives me crazy when I hear people refer to Pizzeria Uno as "Uno's". I've had conversations about it multiple times with different people in my family. There's no one named "Uno", it's a number! I try not to be a prescriptivist but for whatever reason this bothers me to an irrational degree, and I can't understand why nobody else notices.
For example, you you'd say "JCPenney stock is up by 32 cents this week," but you'd also say, "I bought this shirt at Penney's."
[1] https://classics.osu.edu/Undergraduate-Studies/Latin-Program...
Fred Meyer is also not "Fred Meyer's" but at least I can see why that would happen.
Then you have Vons, which used to be "Von's Grocery Company." I guess you go in there now and there's just more than one guy named Von in the store.
Ralphs also dropped the apostrophe.
Albertson's is now "Albertsons."
Kinda funny it seems like Americans are dropping the apostrophes. The exact opposite of what the article is talking about.
At least nobody is saying "Let's go to Costco's."
Also in the PNW, everybody called it "Penny's" for as long as I can remember.
I don't think there's a particular rule that a number can't act as a name like 007's movies. Or that the thing possessing has to be a person, eg. England's weather.
So calling it Uno's isn't inconsistent with how we talk about Walmart's stores or Google's website, for example.
No, calling it "Uno Corp's pizzeria" would be the equivalent. Nobody says they're "Going down to Walmart's" or "doing some research on Google's."
some examples:
80s: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Downtown_Seattle_Pen...
70s: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:FW_Woolworth,_Penney...
60s: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Penneys,_Eastland_Ma...
50s: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:StateLibQld_1_46896_...
40s: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Seattle_-_Second_Ave...
Fun tangent: I learned pretty recently that the southern California grocery chain is named after a man with the last name "Ralphs," so it never had an apostrophe and indeed shouldn't have one (in any language).
My family always used "Penny's" to refer to JC Penny. They also continued to refer to Macy's as Dayton's for years after they had changed their name because the locations were all the same, just the name had changed.
Its funny because I too always felt saying "Penny's" was a regional thing, but more of Midwestern thing.
I.e. Maccas vs McDonald's
Of course, the official website https://mcdonalds.com.au/about-maccas/maccas-story uses an apostrophe which is now making me have the same reaction as the Germans :( and makes me think it was run through some international filter :p outrageous!
Pedant Alert! The chain's name is "Uno Pizzeria & Grill".
You're not wrong, but the actual ordering of the name makes it less clear to a casual observer that there is no person named "Uno".
And the domain the company uses is "unos.com", so at the corporate entity has accepted the name.
Yeah, I've heard servers there say "welcome to Uno's", so I know I've already lost the battle. Like I said, it's not a rational annoyance though, so that doesn't make me feel any better when I hear it.
If you take away the words brought in by immigrants and invaders there is very little recognizable left.
>I'm not exactly worrying about "Haus" creeping into English to replace "House"
It's literally already the same word, we just spell it "wrong", likely out of French/Norman influence.
Could it be that we spell it differently because the word was adopted before spelling was standardised in either language?
This is not true at all. Most of the core vocabulary is derived from Old English. We’ve borrowed a ton of vocabulary to expand new concepts, but the core has remained relatively stable.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_English_words_of_Old...
Note though that in German, "-s" is also a genitive suffix, it's just the spelling that's different here.
It's not a big mystery or even particularly complicated, all regular rules of pluralization and the possessive case. I think people get tripped up in school because they see a specific affectation of dropping the S from possessive forms of the names of some historical personages, e.g. "in Jesus' name."
Edit: As a partially related aside, I have a friend who's right about the same age as me that's incredulous that I was taught to use "they" as a gender neutral pronoun when the subject's gender was unknown (or you desired not convey a gender) back in the late 80s and early 90s. Maybe it's just a regional difference in teaching or something. He's from the UP of Michigan, I'm from Florida. So maybe the same thing is true with possessive nouns
E.g. 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”)
This also happens in German these days even though in this context it makes almost no sense. And nobody is trying to copy McDonald's here.
Now, there are languages for which Globish can be part of an existential threat, but German and French are nowhere close to this. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_endangered_languages
There are also a measurable economical issues for non-English-native nations to have to use the de facto lingua-franca of the day that is English. Of course neither German nor French would be a better alternative as a global international neutral language.
To my knowledge, the only proposal that gained some modest but significant results on that side over the last century is Esperanto. You know, the language against which France has put its veto has it was proposed as language of communication in League of Nations (1920s) or UNESCO (1954) and still is unhelpful with its adoption in United Nations.
Fun fact, Germany has a city where street names and many other things are translated in Esperanto: https://uea.facila.org/artikoloj/movado/la-esperanto-urbo-r3...
That said, it's still a massive improvement on English phonologically. Even if you only consider the simpler American varieties, the three-way æ/ɐ/ɑ distinction alone (as in bat vs but vs bar) is a huge WTF for anyone coming from a typical 5-vowel system. And then you have consonants like θ and ð that don't have clear 1:1 counterparts in most other languages, often not even as allophones of something else that you could point at.
Still, if you want to see what a more modern take on the concept might look like, I believe Globasa (https://www.globasa.net/eng) is the most active project along those lines. Of course, realistically, the likelihood of it actually being adopted as the universal language is effectively nil, but then that's also the case for Esperanto.
But I agree that overly large phonemic inventory is a problem. On the other hand, it seems that languages either have a complex consonant system but a simple vowel system; or a simple consonant system but a complex vowel system; I haven't yet seen a language where both systems are simple (Japanese vowels have tonality, so it's not a simple system IMHO), probably because the words in such a language would have to be quite long.
There are quite a few languages where both vowel and consonant systems are simple - just look at Polynesian languages such as Māori. The latter's vowel system is 5-vowel, and "long vowels" are phonemically vowel sequences that span moras. But, yes, it does mean that you end up with long words such as "whakararurarutia". That said, it's a rather extreme case, and one can still construct fairly simple but rich consonant systems in practice, because it's basically combinatorics - adding just one more bit of information doubles the domain space! So e.g. if you start with a strict CV consonant system and allow C(l/r)V, that's almost 4x as many contrasting syllables. Make it C(l/r/w/y)V(C) like in Globasa, and even with considerable restrictions on clustering stops etc this is enough for most words to be 3 syllables or less, and for most function words to be 1 syllable.
Now, the real success of Esperanto is that it does have an over 1 century international active community that does produce it’s own cultural artifacts, using Esperanto as a communication mean. All that without a bound army to back it at any point, that’s probably an unique feat in human history. Also to make it clear, it was not meant to be a universal language, but an international one.
Personally, I love that projects like Globasa comes to live. On a pragmatic level, large scale adoption is unlikely, but that is the case of any human endeavor. Let’s make sure that grandiloquence result likeliness never inhibit beautiful dreams being pursued.
I live in Germany now. There are 10-15 times more German speakers in the DACH area than there are French speakers in Quebec. Even then, it’s weird that companies no longer bother translating their ads and slogans for the German-speaking market. It’s somewhat sad that every culture is slowly becoming a vaguely American, California-based culture.
Language and culture are intertwined. I feel that with the globalisation of both, something of value is lost. It’s only right to feel concerned about it.
One of the most fascinating things I learned about language in college when I was working towards my degree in Anthropology, a graduate student who was my class did their Master's on the linguistic differences between European French and the French Canadian (specifically the Quebec version) versions of the language. She did extensive research on the origins of the language and why they diverged.
Absolutely fascinating work.
On a lighter note, I happened to play hockey with many, many Canadian players. My best friend was from Ottawa and everybody asked him if he spoke French and said he did and said, "Its like here, you feel like you're speaking French with a Kentucky accent." which always got a good laugh from our teammates.
The story I heard about how Rumantsch (~40k L1) became the 4th language of switzerland is that one day toward the middle of last century, after Mussolini said that rumantsch speakers were just a bunch of farmers who didn't know how to speak proper italian, the swiss people essentially said « Esti d'épais à marde ! » by voting to make it official.
Lagniappe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BjoCmyhTSBU
I know some people that talk to there parents in Rumantsch that but most likely wont teach it to their children.
It will survive but its not really thriving either. Other languages is a great way to push against an 'enemy' language, like the revival of Gaulish in Ireland.
But we will get pretty good AI of it since there is so much official documentation in it.
(after all, even Gian and Giachen speak german)
Lagniappe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UxMuCyzXgC4
As a fellow French speaker, I think these are strengths other languages could gain from. Couriel or email (or e-mail)? Speaker’s choice. Same for possession. (Particularly for a culture with a tradition of individual liberty like France.)
[1]https://www.barrons.com/amp/news/english-just-badly-pronounc...
No, English is a Germanic language whose conjugation rules have severely atrophied, with (mostly specialized!) terminology liberally adopted from Latin, Greek, and other roots. In things like tense and aspect structure, I believe that English hews a lot closer to German than French.
Then, under French influence probably, the plural, you, started being used as a polite form as well (in French, like most romance languages, formal/polite language uses the plural form of pronouns and verbs when addressing a single person). Thou, my friend VS You, sir; similar to "toi, mon ami" vs "vous, monsieur".
Then, this polite form using singular you became so widely used that thou was almost entirely dropped, especially since English also had little distinction between singular and plural in verbs in general. You, my friend, you, my friends.
Then, as thou became more foreign to regular speakers, it briefly started being used as a polite form, essentially reversing the original meanings. You, my friend VS Thou, sir.
This didn't last very long, so finally we ended up with the current state, where there is no polite form and you is the only second person pronoun. Except of course some speakers have started using y'all for a plural form, but that doesn't seem to be gaining any popularity outside a few areas.
Amusingly, using the French words is a signal to being upper class. Such as "purchase" (pourchacier) instead of "buy" (byan).
It's a pretty common thing worldwide, though. French played a similar role as upper class marker in many other countries that were influenced by it when France was at the peak of its global dominance. For Slavic languages, German also played this role at one point, and IIRC there is something similar historically with Chinese in areas in its cultural dominance.
I was taught that this is because the Normans pushed the Germanics out and up north. French dominated the royal court.
Those crazy Masoretic Jews trying to pollute sacred texts with vowels... You're just supposed to know them!
Punctuation was probably introduced by leaky quills dripping until someone put a positive spin on it.
What twist of fate gave us ampersands? Lets keep Ye Olde English pure! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorn_(letter)#Modern_English
Oh totally, my American accent sounds just like, "quand je vais au barbecue le quatre juillet, je vais manger un hot dog avec ketchup."
> But it would be better than having 1,000s of badly pronounced French words in the language.
They're loanwords that changed over time, they're not "badly" pronounced at all. French is filled with many loanwords as well that are pronounced nothing like their language of origin
1. You can’t take things language related from France at face value - they probably have a bias. They have a strong cultural pride and protection over their language. They also have a strong history of political agendas pushing their language as the “international” language. I say this as a non-French speaker of the French language, and I mean no disrespect to the French people. It’s just a cultural element formed over hundreds of years of government policy.
2. The origins of English is not French, but there are many words in English derived from French. But today they’re English words, with a French history. There are many more words that are not French in origin, so it’s quite disingenuous to call English an “incorrect” or “mispronounced” French. Why is it not an “evolved” or “improved” French? (See point 1).
3. English is conjugated, it’s just different than French. “I am, you are, he is”. “I look, you look, he looks”. Or more obviously “I jump, I jumped, I am jumping”. Most of the French-origin words are also probably not verbs but nouns. That said, I have no data to back that up.
Anyway, yeah, I love this sort of mixing of languages and I’m glad a lot of cultures are more open about mixing in English.
I suppose languages evolve around the way their corresponding population brains work. People can still learn other languages, or be native to other languages, but there is a language way that is the best fit to some people which is related to biology.
However, natural languages evolve naturally, which means that they don't just suddenly randomly change, and that change is very gradual. So things tend to get stuck in historically-motivated local maximums that can be very different for different languages because of their different histories.
There are some plausible theories around biologically motivated language features, but this tends to be about the environment - e.g. some sounds seem to be more common in languages spoken in high-altitude areas.
There's always a relation between a spoken word and its written representation, they're the same thing in different mediums.
There was an interesting study (https://aclanthology.org/2021.sigtyp-1.1/) where they evaluated phonemicity of various language orthographies by training a neural net and then seeing how accurately it could predict things. Of two dozen languages they had there, the only ones that scored worse for writing are French and Chinese, but most notably, English is the only one that scored below 50% accuracy for reading, and with a significant gap at that. This is very unfortunate for an international language, since reading is kind of the most basic practical thing you can usually do with a second language.
- words spoken by toddlers: what's the spelling of a word that doesn't exist outside of a kid's brain ? In particular parents can accept it as a word without ever setting an associated writing.
- written words that don't have a pronounciation: typically Latin is dead and how any of it is pronounced is up to how we feel about it.
That's without going into words with phonems unrelated to their written form (XIV as fourteen for instance) and I assume there will be words that exchange spelling and pronounciation with others.
Languages are plenty weird, we should embrace their weirdity IMHO.
How words were pronounced can be deduced from poetry.
Of course. But it's not like we know nothing about it.
I hate that the past tense of "stay" is "stayed", but "say" is "said" and "pay" is "paid", which is often misspelled as "payed", which IS a word, but is unrelated to transferring money from one person to another.
Then you got all the ways "-ough" is pronounced. Thorough, enough, cough, through, thought, dough, drought..."-ough" is now looking like a completely nonsense letter sequence.
(see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English-language_spelling_refo...)
As I recall, the American spelling of color and other words like that was actually dictated by a "pompous authority", namely Noah Webster, who wrote the dictionary bearing his name. He wanted to simplify some spellings he saw as overly complicated. I happen to agree with him, but this wasn't because of regular, everyday people in different regions.
The Académie has no authority whatsoever, it's little more than a club for writers. The Education Ministry has authority for school programs and what is accepted in French language classes, but only in France. It only ever allows new uses, never forbids previously allowed things.
The OQLF (and French language Ministry) has a broader authority within Québec, but only for Québec.
The Ministry of Culture has some authority within the Brussels-Wallonia federation but it's quite limited.
No idea what it's like in Switzerland.
But there is no global authority for the French language (unlike German or Dutch for example). The language evolves by consensus.
I don't think an English standardization would change much in how people actually speak.
Imagine some would stick with original "bonjour" (Qubec), other more progressive would simplify to "bojur" and whatnote.
You have the same with "colour" and "color". Or "night" and "nite". From my observatio where you have some language authority there is at least consisten spelling (and english spelling is all over the place)
en_US vs. en_GB
fr_CA vs fr_FR
Besides, in case of Spanish the spelling is more uniform. Aforementioned locales are mostly for GUIs and regional wording differences. And the thread started with "unifying english spelling" which is just a mess…
VOA also have a Learning English spec for broadcast english [1] but that seems to be a lot looser of a spec.
So it's definitely not impossible. The funny thing, is I remember being told in grade school that in English Canada, I was to write numbers with a space as the thousands separator. `$10 000.00`, instead of `$10,000.00`. This is because french Canada uses a comma as a decimal point, `10 000.00 $`, so a space is non ambiguous. I have rarely ever seen the English space format in use here. I don't think English speakers would respect any authority if it wasn't as domain-scoped as Aviation or Learning english.
[0] https://www.asd-ste100.org/ [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learning_English_(version_of_E...
https://www.bipm.org/documents/20126/28433818/working-docume...
Well, it's definitely not impossible to publish a document declaring itself the standard form of english.
But I'm pretty sure it would be impossible to get english speakers to comply - or even to get any countries to make the standard legally binding.
That's even less likely now than in the past, with the elite cultural trends in English-speaking countries favoring the adoption of foreign spellings and pronunciation. That just piles on the complexity to unmanageable levels.
IMHO, for instance, there's no excuse for the requirement that English newspaper readers know Pinyin [1], rather than some more English-friendly romanization system, to be able to read news about China, when Chinese speakers themselves use a completely different, non-roman writing system. What's next, just printing the Chinese characters without romanization? Pinyin has its uses, but writing things out for foreigners is not something it does well.
[1] which gives many letters very unexpected values (e.g. c = ts) and many vowels are impossible for an English-speaker to guess correctly.
I do agree that the currently dominant English convention of adopting spelling from other languages (or their standard Romanization system) as is - or worse yet, dropping all the diacritics but keeping everything else as is - is misguided. But it doesn't help that English spelling can get very unwieldy when trying to spell something phonetically, especially across many dialects of English due to considerable variability in how things are pronounced. This has also caused problems - for an example of that, look at the still-common Korean Romanization of names such as "Park" which does not accurately represent the actual pronunciation if you pronounce it as an American would ("r" is silent - it reflects the non-rhotic British pronunciation, and was put there because the more straightforward "Pak" would tend to be pronounced incorrectly by a Brit).
The Mainlanders would find it very insulting to not use Pinyin when referring to subjects in the PRC, so understandably, American journalism goes along with that.
For what it's worth I think both systems have different disadvantages, in that neither does a good job of reflecting the actual pronunciation of Guoyu. Excuse me, Putonghua. Doing so with the English character set isn't actually possible.
For instance the current PRC secretary name is pronounced accordingly to the characters' reading in Taiwan and Japan, and won't have much in common. Same way Chinese people will read Japanese name as the characters sound to them, without referring to the actual Japanese reading, even if in Japan these names have a designated original reading.
It's pretty good for Mandarin speakers. It's terrible for English speakers.
> Can you elaborate on what you mean by “English-friendly”?
English friendly is something that will produce reasonably-close approximate pronunciations by an English reader without any extra foreign-language training. Basically, something that prioritizes following existing English orthography (e.g. do not use "c" for "ts", use the closest approximate for sounds that do no exist in English) instead of maximal fidelity to the foreign language.
I think there is also the issue of cultural dominance. "English-friendly" means the foreign language is morphed to better suit English speakers. It could go the other way if Mandarin is the dominant trade language.
How could it? English is not a tonal language at all, so how could you possibly represent tonality with Latin characters, in a way that English speakers with no extra training could read such text and pronounce the Chinese word in an acceptable way? I don't think it's possible. It's just like trying to use Japanese characters to represent English names: a LOT is lost in translation, because there's simply no way to represent all English sounds in Japanese, since Japanese has far fewer possible sounds than English.
>It could go the other way if Mandarin is the dominant trade language.
But it's not, English is, like it or not. If you want to communicate with someone in any random country in the world, you have a very good chance of doing so if you speak English, regardless of your or the listener's native language. The same isn't true for Mandarin.
It's not an issue of cultural dominance, as no one would be forcing the Chinese to change their names or their pronunciations. It's basically just keeping English from being even more unmanageable, in a way many other languages do, including Chinese.
If an English name or other word is used in Chinese (or in Japanese, or many other languages) it gets localized. For instance, watch this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ix2xYvMcW2A. The Chinese speakers are mostly talking about Trump, but the only name I could actually pick out was Obama's (probably because "Trump" is hard to pronounce in Chinese).
Apparently the Xinhua decided to render "Trump" as 特朗普/Te Lang Pu (https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2017/01/25/china-d...), instead of doing the American/English thing of "You don't know their language? Well f-you then. No help from us."
Also, the English use of Pinyin can have some unfortunate effects. I used to work with a man who's last name was Cao whose name was mispronounced "Cow" almost 100% of the time (there was a strong preference for first-name use in the office, so it rarely happened to his face).
Consider a rather unusual (but real nevertheless) Polish surname: «Brzęczyszczykiewicz». Most native English speakers, who are not well known for their patience with long and unusually looking non-native surnames, will instantly give up and shorten it to a mere «B». The most daring and adventurous ones will persevere and will likely arrive at something akin to «Brenshistishkevich», which is neither correct nor easily pronounceable for an English speaker anyway. The few English speakers who are acquainted with Polish, would render and pronounce «Brzęczyszczykiewicz» as «Bzhenchishchikyevich» which is closer to truth, yet it will confuse everyone else who will stick with «Brenshistishkevich» anyway.
Or consider an Icelandic surname of «Þórðarson». We would have «Thordarson» (as a naïve take) or «Thortharson» (somewhat closer to the actual Icelandic version).
Bonus point: Llanfairpwllgwyngyll, a Welsh surname, with the «colloquial» vocalisation of «Lanfarpwilgwingle» vs «Hlan-fair-pool-gwin-gith» (a more truthful rendition).
In all cases, with Brenshistishkevich, Thordarson and Llanfairpwllgwyngyll, we have arrived at the English equivalent of Te Lang Pu (Trump). In fact, there is no need to look at more extreme cases, it will suffice to consider a simple Vietnamese name of «Huy», which most English speakers will pronounce as «Hughey» whereas it is actually «Hwee» – it is still the case of the English Te Lang Pu.
In the case of Mandarin Chinese, the problem is exacerbated by the fact that the Chinese writing script is logographic and can't encode single consonants (single sounds in general, although there are Chinese characters that encode vowelled words, usually exclamations). Secondly (or firstly, in fact), all Chinese languages have a strict rule of a phoneme having the CV(C) structure (Consonant-Vowel(maybe another Consonant)), which makes the CCVCC (i.e. Trump) compound impossible and is completely against the phonetic rules of the language. And many, very many in fact, Chinese speakers neither know pinyin nor speak English. The same is true for many other non-Chinese languages.
It gets a bit better, e.g., in Japanese that, other than the logographic script, has two syllabaries that make it possible to represent Trump as something probably more like Tu-ru-mpu.
> I used to work with a man who's last name was Cao whose name was mispronounced "Cow" […]
Since you also earlier called out «[…] (e.g. do not use "c" for "ts", use the closest approximate for sounds that do no exist in English) instead of maximal fidelity to the foreign language», spelling Cao as Tsao (which is what they do in Taiwan but not in the mainland) is not going help as nearly all English speakers will drop the «t» and pronounce it as «Sao». And, since «ts» is one sound and not two, «Sao» is also the English Te Lang Pu.
I honestly don’t care if someone uses “color” or “colour” or makes ghoti jokes at the English language’s expense.
Unfortunately for the rest of the world outside of your beloved "anglosphere" using wrong spelling results in said "anglosphereian" being utterly butthurt.
Maybe the whole world should adopt universal language with saner spelling and leave english to anglosphere?
Don’t put words in my mouth.
> Maybe the whole world should adopt universal language with saner spelling and leave english to anglosphere?
The rest of the world could. They won’t. But they could. You could use this as part of your spelling reforms: https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=81 :)
> guidelines issued by the body regulating the use of Standard High German orthography
gives a somewhat false impression regarding the influence and standing of this body. Orthography was traditionally what was written in the Duden dictionary/thesaurus. Only in 2004 or so there was a push for a moderate reform for German as taught in schools, and it was deemed necessary to have at least Austria and Switzerland join (hence the council isn't a natioval body), whereas neighbouring countries with German-speaking minorities such as Italy were not sitting at the table it seems.
The US doesn't use Imperial units; it uses "US Customary" units. They're not the same, though there is some overlap. Imperial units are used in the UK, which is why they're called "imperial" (from "empire"--the British Empire). Imperial inches, for instance, are the same as US inches (2.54cm), but UK/Imperial gallons are quite different from US gallons, which is why the miles-per-gallon ratings for cars are so different between the two countries.
From my observation adoption of english (and it's slang) is mostly due to "verbal colonialism" - pop culture mixed with "we work in english" spiced with "I'm cool so I'll drop this pointless slang from foreign language"...
Erm... curious that you brought that up as I lived in Chile for a couple of years and now in Spain. And while I agree that Chilean Spanish is wild it does follow RAE spelling guidelines, or at the very least I haven't seen any obvious deviations. Now there's a lot of modismos ("chilenismos", local words formed usually by borrowing from natives Mapuche in south or Quechua in the north) but they still tend to follow more-or-less spelling. Accent/pronounciation is yet another thing but that doesn't affect spelling all that much. And on top of that there is a lot of "mutilation" of words when using whatsapp (either being in a hurry or being from low social background) but even in even so slightly more formal setting people immediatelly fallback to official spelling.
(Spanish is more gracefull when it comes to spelling as "what you hear you write" and vice versa so maybe the problem is less pronounced)
I doubt either country will ever accept the other's version.
> To my knowledge, the only proposal that gained some modest but significant results on that side over the last century is Esperanto. You know, the language against which France has put its veto has it was proposed as language of communication in League of Nations (1920s) or UNESCO (1954) and still is unhelpful with its adoption in United Nations.
Esperanto is not a "global international neutral language" either. While artificially constructed, it's functionally a Romance language, deriving over 80% of its vocabulary as well as the majority of its grammatical structure from Latin and/or Romance languages. The majority of the remainder comes from other European languages, primarily Germanic languages.
Also, interestingly enough, Esperanto attracted more interest in some Asian countries - most notably, Japan - than in much of Europe.
I think the bigger problem with Esperanto is phonology. It's too heavy on affricates, including some relatively rare ones (e.g. phonemic "ts"), and the consonant clusters get pretty bad. For someone coming from a simple CV language, those are likely to be a bigger challenge than the word list.
All languages evolve through time, but I think that a major factor of evolution was the fact that it was accepted ~20 years ago that it's OK to write phonetically at school. And now we have school teachers that learned that way so it's definitely a standard feature of the current French.
For example the following hilarious reader comment in the economic news website "La Tribune":
"plutot que dire 18 milliares de deficte pour faire les gros titres il serais plus interessant de dire d'ou vient le soit disant deficite . La secu ne serait elle pas victime de paiement de prestations qui ne la concerne pas . qui s'en richie sur son dos ? N y aurit il pas des acteurs economiques qui ne participeraient pas a son financement et par contre lui demanderait des presttions ? c'est cela que lon veut savoir un peut comme les retriates ou le regime generale eponge les déficites qui ne le concerne pas par ce que letat ne finance pas les retaites de la fonction publique a son juste niveau."
While it may be accidental, maybe stemming the tide against Franglais will have a large secondary benefit for the minority language speakers of France. If your average native Gallo(e.g.) speaker needs to learn French in order to watch the news, that's one thing. If they then need to learn a bunch of English in order to speak French, well there's even less of a chance that they'll be able to spend a lot of their life speaking Gallo.
IDK maybe it will make no difference for those languages; French will crowd them out regardless of how much English there is in French.
Aside: I used to assume the term referred to how French was once "the language of diplomacy", but it really comes from "Frankish", at a time when "Franks" was a broad term for peoples of what is now western Europe.
and some minor contribution from the Normans of course...
Being a linga-frinca has nothing to do with merits though.
Aside from "linga franca" being literally "French", it's a matter of which group of nations have a tremendously dominant position on the international scene. If China was to take hold of India and Russia and set the rules for the rest of the world, the defacto linga-frinca won't be English for long, however intricate people might feel about Chinese.
At least that should be the case in free societies. Language is power - and controlling it is an important aspect of exercising control.
In a way language is one of the only truly democratic institutions. We all vote for new words and new pronunciations by using them or not using them. The collective action of all these choices is the language.
For example, in the Mariana Islands, there are two independent othography committees that have been low-key duking it out over an indigenous language with less than 50k native speakers; see these brief highlights[1; p. 11 onward] from a recognized scholar of the language for a small sampling.
In the CNMI, the language is routinely spoken (i.e. English is a second language in most households) and the CNMI's othography committee has taken a conservative approach, focusing on simple written rules that capture sound as spoken, and biasing its orthography towards serving as an optimal language preservation mechanism...which makes objective sense given its target population is overwhelmingly fluent.
In Guam, however, the spoken language was nearing generational extinction largely driven by American colonial influence not dissimilar to the going concern of native Hawaiians. Ironically, Guam's better funded orthography committee has taken a much more liberal approach in establishing new written rules and spellings (e.g. CHamoru is the official spelling of the language/people written into law as of 2017; yes, the letter CH is now entirely capitalized in a proper noun; previously Chamoru, as opposed to the prevailing and historically consistent Chamorro in the CNMI).
There's also been a recent resurgence of language adoption by the native youth cohort on Guam largely motivated by grassroots sociopolitical identity movement. This hipster generation has taken it upon themselves to replace an ever growing number of established words adopted during colonial rule hundreds of years ago with all but forgotten words of the ancient tongue...which I suppose is fair game as language evolution goes, but it's gotten to a point of irony where these changes are throwing off the elder native-speaking generation responsible for passing on the language to their progeny, e.g. family (English) --> familia (Spanish adopted) --> manggåfa (antiquated is the new hip). In contrast, no such shift in zeitgeist is happening in the CNMI.
[1] https://people.ucsc.edu/~schung/orthog_differences.pdf#page=...
And there is no true way to "vote with your feet" if you get punished for violating the official orthography.
Not to mention other sources of non-organic language change, like e.g. suppressing dia- or sociolects, but I also don't want to delve (hehe) too far. :P
(But the reason was people thinking it's a "Bildungshindernis", a roadblock in the pursuit of knowledge, like if people speaking dialect were mentally challenged - not national unity)
Ich hat das nicht verstanden. Ich kann mit meinem fusse wahlen.
Wie konnte ich fur schlecte Deutsch bestraft werden? Ich wohne nicht in Deutschland.
Und ja, meinem Deutsch ist sehr schlecht. Das stimmt. Kommen sie damit klar.
Edit: Fixed (without really improving) my terrible german.
If you just let it "develop organically" without any governing body you get a wide range of dialects that will drift further apart from another and it will be very difficult to read any text that is 50 years old.
FWIW the German equivalent is much less prescriptive, it only weighs in on grammar / punctuation.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acad%C3%A9mie_Fran%C3%A7aise
'Courriel' is still commonly used by French Canadians, but indeed it was never widely adopted by France. As a French Canadian, I usually use 'courriel", though the anglicism 'e-mail' is also quite commonly used. Can't say I've ever seen anyone use 'mél', tho.
True they adapt the standard over time following common usage, but the standard is the primary source of truth and many things are decided unilaterally regardless of common usage.
For example in Lithuanian, an "influencer" is colloquially called "influenceris". But in Lithuanian "influence" translates to "įtakos", so it isn't anywhere close to correct.
The terms "įtakdarys" (influence maker) or "nuomonės formuotojas" (opinion shaper) would be a more Lithuanian version, as they are based on existing Lithuanian words. However in this case "influenceris" rolls off the tounge a lot easier, so maybe it is acceptable to be used.
The purpose of these institutes is to decide which is the correct word to use.
It's not unique to English linguists, it's a tenet of modern linguistics in general. A language is defined by the way people actually speak. If that's influenced by a central organization, fine, but that does not contradict descriptivism at all. Someone studying a language should always study the way the language is spoken by real people, using prescriptivist sources as supplementary sources of information where needed.
But there is a practical difference: textbooks and dictionaries in English have traditionally come from distributed institutions, which are eminent but none of them claims to be official, whereas for example in Spanish they all originate from or closely follow the standards of the Real Academia.
Sometimes unified standards have been artificially created, like for Basque or Mandarin, and in those cases prescriptivism is more dominant.
This sounds very similar to the common law vs. civil law traditions as well. I wonder if there's a connection between linguistics and legal systems.
As much as we need someone to define what is http, TCP/IP or Posix we also need someone to define what is English, Spanish or any language.
If you don't believe it then try to understand whatever language a Venezuelan or Dominican speaks. That blabber is anything but Spanish.
Why? Humans are almost infinitely more adaptable and capable of dynamically changing their behaviour compared to computer programs. Learning to understand/speak a new pseudo dialect of your native language isn't particularly hard. Millions of people do that near effortlessly on a daily basis (especially in many German speaking areas).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Association_of_Academies_of_th...
An insight from Oscar Wilde:
> Mr. Noel, in one of his essays, speaks with much severity of those who prefer sound to sense in poetry. No doubt, this is a very wicked thing to do. But he himself is guilty of a much graver sin against art when, in his desire to emphasise the meaning of Chatterton, he destroys Chatterton's music. In the modernised version he provides of the wonderful Songe to Ælla, he mars the poem's metrical beauty with his corrections, ruins the rhymes, and robs the music of its echo. [1]
(^^ that's from a short but wonderful essay, worth reading!)
[1] https://ia800203.us.archive.org/23/items/collectedworksau12w...
But hey, there are no rules or logic in English so have at it!
I thought about trees:
Tree leaves (leaves from a tree)
Trees leaves (same but from more than one variety of tree)
Same logic for water:
Water edge (an edge that happens to be of a body of water)
Waters edge (same but of more than one body of water)
or it could be the single tree is vacating the area
> Trees leaves (same but from more than one variety of tree)
or multiple trees are vacating the area
we could equally turn edge into a verb as well. so now we have a whole other meaning outside of an apostrophe
---
Minor correction: they are derived, not influenced by Vulgar Latin.
That's why so many words are different from Classical Latin, but similar between Romance languages. Like how Latin for house is "domus", but Romance languages use casa/casă/chez because common people referred to their house by the word "casa".
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Slavic/x...
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Slavic/p...
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Slavic/j...
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Slavic/b...
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Slavic/g...
The phrasing "evolved in the past due to the influence of" has a more expansive meaning than "influenced by."
We anticipated that the British or Americans would try to sneakily introduce their words about computers so we appointed a group of 70-something-years-old literature experts to create the proper words to use for computer stuff.
They came up with novel words that made us the laughingstock of the Western world and that nobody wanted to use. The state organizations were forced to, so for some time nobody understood anybody (this is a slightly romanced version but it was a mess).
Some of the words made sense, most did not. They were published by an important organization in France as a dictionary.
We did a lot of great things in computer science - this dictionary was not one of them.
This was part of the Czech National Revival: a huge movement in the 1800s to prevent Czech language and culture to die out under the German/Austrian influence. During that time, the vocabulary saw a boom of new, original words (including ridiculous ones) to combat Germanisms at all cost.
And so to this day, a portion of the Czech periodic table has unique naming of elements, completely unrelated to their Latin counterparts.
I thought it was particularly funny and embarrassing for the store, but I couldn't get the clerk at the store to understand what was wrong.
I would have loved to watch that conversation :-)
Not surprising. Tons of Americans are borderline illiterate. It's one of many things that makes it annoying to live here, especially as the amount of communication done in text increases with more advents in technology.
I recall reading somewhere that the standard reading level for the states is about sixth grade, and if anything that comes across to me as slightly generous. Honestly this is one of my few hopes with the proliferation of LLM: that it will make reading communications from other workers less utterly painful.
I used to wonder if there was something wrong with my email, then I considered maybe they were likely busy, indifferent, or lazy, and now I wonder if they are just barely functionally literate so that drafting a response induces a significant mental burden.
By somehow magically inferring what the person was trying to say and padding it with pointless verbosity?
I'm afraid we'll need to wait for Neuralink 20.0 to solve this problem...
For example "Photo's".
* Third-person singular indefinite ("he or she") can be replaced with third-person plural ("they"). Of course, a lot of changes around recognizing gender.
* Final punctuation within the quote at the end of sentence (Did you just say "what?") can be placed after the final quote if the quote is for a literal string (ie, The password is "123456".)
* Companies switched from being singular plurals ("Google is deprecating another product.") to plural singulars ("Google are deprecating another product.")
* Moving away from verbed nouns ("Google it") to multipart verbs ("search it up").
* Double infinitives ("to try to eat") getting changed to an infinitive and conjunction ("to try and eat").
I just wish it didn't conflate singular and plural. But the convenience of broadening an existing pattern rather than inventing a completely new one still wins in the end.
Gendered pronouns and nouns are just a bunch of useless sexist baggage and linguistic friction that make languages much harder to learn, and uselessly complex, with more trivial arbitrary details to memorize or get wrong.
But all those gender-critical sex-obsessed people who make a big deal out of getting performatively offended and pretending to be confused by neutral pronouns, angrily insisting that every word possible explicitly defines a gender, are just weird.
The person doth protest too much, methinks.
But English nouns are already ungendered with very few exceptions. Pronouns are also all ungendered except third person singular, so there's a much stronger case here for eliminating the exception in contexts where it really doesn't contribute anything useful.
As far as getting offended, I think one has to distinguish between the person getting misgendered being offended themselves vs people getting offended "on behalf" of others (who might actually be rather offended at such misrepresentation of what they actually want). E.g. with Spanish it's far more common for native English speakers to be adamant about "-x", while many native Spanish speakers actively dislike it.
They weren't recognizing genderless people just because they used "they" when the gender was unknown ;)
Not true. It was used in the past to refer to an unknown person. I.e. "When a candidate arrives given them the test." You don't know what sex the candidate is before he arrives and instead of saying "he or she" you say "they".
But nowadays people use it as a superclass of he and she: "I asked my boss for a raise but they refused". It doesn't make any sense. You know very well what sex your boss is, but "they" is used for virtue signaling. It's a way of saying "I know my boss is a man, but I'm going to use they because a woman could do just a good a job and he, sorry, they does."
I doubt it's virtue signaling. I'll use they to refer to the position not the person. Sometimes it's deliberate obscuration. Other times it's a form of laziness. I don't have to think about which pronoun to use if I just use the generic one.
In my case, once I got used to seeing people as people first instead of their gender, it's been easy to slip up on the pronoun.
There's no virtue signalling, you're reading too much into it.
You don't know why other people choose to use the words they do, yet you presume the worst and accuse people of being insincere and lacking virtue despite (and because of) their polite behavior, regardless of their true beliefs, when it's actually none of your business to police and judge their grammar.
I'd rather work with someone who purposefully signals they have virtue than someone who purposefully signals they're a sexist asshole, any day.
The person you responded to is right. If you start mixing in "they" you're just confusing the listener, because they will assume you're now talking about some different people. I wouldn't have the patience to listen to somebody who speaks in that matter and deliberately makes their words cryptic.
I thought this was just a difference between American and British English.
> * Final punctuation within the quote at the end of sentence (Did you just say "what?") can be placed after the final quote if the quote is for a literal string (ie, The password is "123456".)
Prior to movable type printing presses, the British "logical quotation" system was the norm for English.
This changed, and is credited to american newspapers, because of movable type. I've heard different reasoning (from being less likely to break, or to looking cleaner), but both point to printers. Even the alternate name for this quotation style is "typesetters quotation." <== the period inside the quote to end that sentence!
Being a form of mass media, this meant that a lot of mass produced works now 'promoted' by proxy this typesetters quotation style.
Source for some more info on the above: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quotation_marks_in_English
> * Moving away from verbed nouns ("Google it") to multipart verbs ("search it up").
This is purely branding. In the US, if people say "Google it", it creates a synonym between "Google" and "Search", which hurts cases for Google in defending their brand... If it gets too weak, then you or I could make a "Google Booster" company, which focuses on improving search engine rankings in general -- not just Google, and with no direct business relation with Google
See: Kleenex, Band-aid, ChapStick, Crock-pot, Jacuzzi
> * Moving away from verbed nouns ("Google it") to multipart verbs ("search it up").
Resist! Google is trying to get you to stop Googling things, but we don't have to listen to the corporate overlords.
Or worse, 'to try eat', 'to go get', etc.
It's very American to my ear, but it's certainly invading.
Another corruption triple like that is to do something 'accidentally' / 'by accident' / 'on accident'.
I think that's just a grammatical error that people (sometimes) make, and it isn't even specific to English.
In 2024 there's no need to feel sad about deprecated (or now niche) skills being lackluster.
I'd be more concerned if she couldn't find information efficiently when she goes searching for it. That's a skill that mustn't be lackluster.
For example 'hund' (dog) becomes "hundes" in the genitive form and was written "hund's" when the 'e' was elided.
is there any other non-foreign use of ' that is not such a replacement?
Why is 'Eva's Brille incorrect', but 'Eva's Blumenladen' ok?
"Eva's Blumenladen" is the proper name of the shop, what is put on the sign above the door.
"Evas Brille" is just Eva's glasses.
In the same way, people will wonder why you spelled "Eva's" in "Eva's Blumenladen" wrong, if you spell it that way.
Yes, if enough people start doing a wrong thing, it'll eventually become "right", and I guess in 100 year's we can put apostrophy's where'ever we wa'nt, but currently it still looks odd, and like something that is foreign to German, and imported from English. Because unlike in English, in German this apostrophy doesn't stand for an omitted letter in the genitive singular ending.
https://www.caesars.com/caesars-palace/things-to-do/nightlif...
(This confused the heck out of me at first too.)
So Evas Blumenladen is called Eva's Blumenladen is correct.
1: I was only able to find something in German: https://www.wiwo.de/politik/ausland/realsatire-aus-bruessel-...
For example, "Hast Du das geprüft?" quickly turns into "Hast du das gecheckt?".
„Was meinst, kriegen wir das hin?“
„Safe Digga, das ist so was von easy.“
And they think they're so cool talking like that.
The part that irritates me though is when I try to pronounce Denglish stuff with a German accent and the Germans end up not understanding me. I made a joke about strippers once and got only blank looks, then one guy said, "oh, you mean strippers," pronouncing it the way you'd say it in English as best as he could. I had pronounced it schtrippas.
Ironically, even British English has the issue of Americanisms sneaking in, see e.g. the IT Crowd episode: "How hard is it to remember 911?" "You mean 999? That's the American one".
But the worst thing is usually the acute accent is used instead of a real apostrophe, which just makes it stand out even more.
That said, I really dislike how "bureaucratic" German spelling rules are, including this recent addition. Instead of blanket allowing the use of an apostrophe for the genitive (at least for personal names), the new rule allows it only in very specific circumstances. I'm of the opinion that nobody should have to consult a complicated rulebook in order to write well (in fact, the best way is to just simply read a lot and then mimic what you read).
Then again, most people don't need to care about what is or isn't considered proper spelling. In theory it should matter for official documents etc., but that doesn't mean that those never contain errors (quite the contrary, in my experience).
Exactly. If you ask me it kind of makes sense to have it for possesive (not plural) use anyway. It clarifies that the s is not part of the name but serves a different function.
The US still has some places that contain possessive forms in their names, such as Martha's Vineyard. That seems to have caused some controversy during a standardization effort of place names in the 19th century. The apostrophe was dropped and the official name became "Marthas Vineyard". At some point, it was changed back, I assume because it looked too awkward and ungrammatical.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apostrophe#Possessives_in_geog...
(As a non-American, the more curious thing for me is that there are still place names that sound as if some 17th century explorer just sailed by and casually gifted the place to his wife. I'd now also like to know who John E. was.)
However, as mentioned in the article, not clear to me if this is in fact because of the English influence or some other reason.
On a different note, it's somewhat amusing that "i.e.", "e.g." and "etc." are considered English without any clear alternative in the language, while otherwise Latin-loving Germans haven't adopted those at all (in fairness, "d.h.", "bspw." and "usw." are just fine and I appreciate it when real German is used consistently).
The weird and exceptional thing is rather that $ is put before the number, which is out of step with pronunciation.
What makes you think that? The intention of the € symbol is to be used exactly like other currency notations before it in each respective language. In English it’s before the number, but in many others including German, it is after (50,00 DM).
/** No conversion is performed. */
CONVERT_REGULAR( "'", "regular" ),
/** Apostrophes become MODIFIER LETTER APOSTROPHE ({@code ʼ}). */
CONVERT_MODIFIER( "ʼ", "modifier" ),
/** Apostrophes become APOSTROPHE ({@code '}). */
CONVERT_APOS_HEX( "'", "hex" ),
/** Apostrophes become XML APOSTROPHE ({@code '}). */
CONVERT_APOS_ENTITY( "'", "entity" );
[1]: https://whitemagicsoftware.com/keenquotes/
[2]: https://tedclancy.wordpress.com/2015/06/03/which-unicode-cha...
That's why there aren't two different period characters to represent the end of a sentence vs. a decimal point, or two different em dashes where one represents a pause while the other comes at the end of dialog to indicate the sentence was interrupted (literally the opposite of a pause, it's being cut off).
So since the apostrophe and the right single quote are visually identical, Unicode stays consistent in recommending that they be the same character. The name Unicode gives to a character is intended to represent one of its semantic meanings, not all of them.
(Unicode does have plenty of visually identical characters, but they generally belong to totally different languages, like the English "o" and the Greek omicron "ο".)
As a side-effect, since GPTs are based on the examples we give, they can't encode the proper punctuation for many phrases that use British English quotation mark styles, making them unable to "curl" the quotation mark properly. For example, none can curl this paragraph correctly:
''E's got a 'ittle box 'n a big 'un,' she said, 'wit' th' 'ittle 'un 'bout 2'×6". An' no, y'ain't cryin' on th' "soap box" to me no mo, y'hear. 'Cause it 'tweren't ever a spec o' fun!' I says to my frien'.
Well, and I'd suggest the unambiguous information was usually never there in the first place. It's less of an encoding problem, and more of an input "problem". People type either a single quote/apostrophe, or a double quote, and let smart quotes sort it out.
And sure, smart quotes will fail spectacularly with your spectacularly pathological example! Heck, it took me a few seconds to figure out what on earth was going on with the first 5 characters. :)
Your example would usually be typeset properly in a physical published book because it's done with professionals manually reviewing the typography.
Just throw it in the bucket of hyphens vs. minuses vs. dashes em and en, x's versus multiplication signs... our symbols are full of ambiguities, it's not just apostrophes.
Smart quotes fail in simple cases, too.
https://gitlab.com/DaveJarvis/KeenQuotes/-/tree/main/src/tes...
I've developed a lexer/parser that can disambiguate most cases, but wow was it a chore to write.
> Well, and I'd suggest the unambiguous information was usually never there in the first place.
Interesting. Isn't the text ambiguous because the glyphs lack the semantics to capture the usage of apostrophes versus closing single quotes? It's a Catch-22, isn't it? If UNICODE had semantics for apostrophes versus right single quotes, then our documents would be unambiguous. But we can't make them unambiguous because UNICODE doesn't capture these semantics.
No -- as I said before, it's an input problem before anything else. There aren't separate keys for apostrophe and right single quote on the keyboard. We don't even have separate keys for left and right quotes. So even if there were encodings for them, they wouldn't be used correctly. They'd be used correctly about as often as people type a proper minus sign rather than a hyphen for subtraction, which is almost never.
I see where we have our wires crossed. I'm not considering the input problem because my software (KeenQuotes) parses the source document's apostrophes into their correct semantics (99.9% of the time).
My issue is that, having discerned the correct English single quotation mark (straight, apostrophe, or closing), I have no way of encoding it into a document that retains the semantics while typesetting it using common fonts (to match double quotes). My point is that if UNICODE had a way of capturing the semantics, it would at least be technically possible to create unambiguous documents, input notwithstanding.
Matthew Butterick, a typographer, states, "I’ve never seen any LaTeX-created documentation that’s gotten this right":
https://practicaltypography.com/straight-and-curly-quotes.ht...
I sent him a screenshot showing my software typesetting the quotation marks properly, albeit with a document that has incorrect semantics (as per our discussion):
But that's not what Unicode is for. The apostrophe situation is just one of 100 things I could think of off the top of my head. Unicode encodes characters, not semantics. And this is by design, because people don't input, or want to input, semantics -- they just want to type something that looks right. Something other people can read, not something computers can semantically parse.
So we have a bunch of heuristic and AI and manual tools we use to try to annotate things semantically, and we put that information at the level of something like XML, not Unicode. Which is infinitely more flexible, because you can define and use whatever semantics you want, not limited to whatever the Unicode body decided.
If KeenQuotes gets apostrophes right 99.9% of the time, then just use that to automatically analyze all your input text and then store and process it in some kind of XML notation, like "Peter<apos>’</apos>s" or "<possessive>Peter’s</possessive>" or "<word>Peter’s</word>" or something. Unicode is the wrong level of abstraction.
The output from KeenQuotes is used by KeenWrite. KeenWrite can generate text, HTML, XHTML, and PDF documents. Those output document formats lack correct the semantics because of UNICODE. As much as rolling my own XML notation would be fun, it won't work in practice---nobody would be able to publish their exported documents for viewing or general consumption. We'll have to agree to disagree on this one: I think UNICODE dropped the ball on English apostrophes where it didn't have to. Having one more character for curled apostrophes would have kept open the possibility of encoding unambiguous HTML documents (with respect to apostrophes/right single quotes for quotations; your point about other characters I quite appreciate).
Another thing is that what happened in the article is something that has occurred a lot in English too. I think a few years back they permitted “myriad of” just because it was so common a mistake. This happened even though myriad is supposed to be used exactly like the words “numerous” or “many” and shouldn’t be followed by an “of”. Still, despite having simple examples of similar words, like numerous, people just couldn’t stop saying “myriad of”.
I see it all the time now. I wouldn’t say I love the change, but I don’t get upset about it or correct people, since it’s technically perfectly alright now, even if it’s accepted for sort of a sad reason.
Apparently it used to/still means 10,000 so it should be usable anywhere 10,000 is. "There were a myriad of them"/"there were 10,000 of them".
If anything it seems that using myriad as an adjective was actually an example of a rule change made to accommodate how people were speaking at the time.
Off topic, but now I do kind of wish the Magic: The Gathering mechanic was named "Legion" instead of "Myriad".
> Bob's "Big" Bookstore!
So they didn't actually simplify it - they made it more complicated? But my single largest pet peeve with the original reform is that they "outlawed" the use of the English plural form for loan words like "Party". In German, you are now supposed to write "Partys", "Parties" is incorrect. Bet they didn't change that... or did they?
however there are also plenty of counterexamples especially on the plural of foreign words, especially from latin, where a latin plural is expected.
what this suggests to me is that singular and plural have to be integrated separately.
"party" is essentially already a german word. "parties" isn't (yet)
"party" distinguishes itself from "feier" because the later means "celebration", where as "party" in german can be used for parties that don't celebrate anything.
So I guess this is some sort of a (certainly not arbitrary) compromise to appease both sides.
And completely agree about young generations, I've actually been super pleased at how many new words gen z is creating! I feel like the previous few generations created way fewer words. I disagree with things like introducing inconsistent spellings like "lyk" in terms of adopting that as a standard, because it just makes the language a headache to learn. But creating words for things that don't have existing words (like carrapticious in my other example), or even creating new sort of word variations which kind of grow/evolve into their own words (like rizz) seem like a nice expressive way of extending language. (I'm a bit more mixed on the value of the latter, though).
As the articles notes, this kind of apostrophe has been "correct" for many, many years, at least for names, and no, not just for avoiding confusion with names ending in 's'. The "Duden" (one of the officially recognized authorities for German spelling) has had the example "Willi's Würstchenbude" for many years, despite "Willis" not being a common name in Germany.
Now that one tries to simplify things, the Cliff Clavins of Germany freak out because they lose one example where they could feel smarter than others. There really is nothing to see here.
Given how the apostrophe thing is received I expect no less than riots and burning tires in the streets once that one is officially allowed.
If you can not substitute a usage of "it's" for "it has", "it was", or "it is", then you meant to say "its".
It is hard to even be angry about it, I think the language should be changed so that any instances of "its" -> "it's" to eliminate the exception.
These aren't arbitrary rules, for the most part: they came into existence to assist with reading comprehension. The clarity of expression afforded by modern English is a great gift, and I strongly believe that allowing it to degenerate by abandoning these (very simple!) rules will serve only to make written English less expressive and more opaque.
Say that you have i-t
followed by apostrophe
s, now what does that mean?
You would not use "it's" in this case!
As a possessive
It's a contraction
What's a contraction?
Well, it's the shortening of a word
or group of words by omission of a
sound or letter.
(Nowadays I just don't double check it and it's basically a cointoss if I get it right or not :P)
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/mu7ami_how-an-apostrophe-almo...
I didn’t understand why Eva’s Brille is incorrect. Anyone understand the difference? Is it only allowed for commercial entities?
Ross's Bar? No, can't be. Ross' Bar? Argh. I'm all for style but unnecessary additions just make life difficult.
- Rosi's Bar
- Rosis Bar
With the first it's immidiately clear that Rosi is a woman's name and that the bar belongs to her. With the second it's not clear at all what Rosis is. Maybe some kind drink?
- Sport Bar
- Lounge Bar
- Cafe Bar
(All from real german bar names.)
- Rosis Bar
Rosis could just as well be a word like Sport, Lounge or Cafe.
Rosis-Bar = a bar serving (or otherwise related to) “Rosis”
Rosis Bar = Rosi’s bar
It's just spelling. Also, please check your old Duden, Regel 16b, you will be surprised.
But Eva's Blumenladen is a foreign spelling of German words.
Additionally the spelling with an apostrophe needs more space therefore more material to print and print onto. A waste of resources.
It's like the Deppen-Bindestrich and ruins the compactness of German spelling.
Maybe english should adapt body back for backpack in exchange.
You are presumably referring to the OQLF (a provincial institution, not a “Canadian” one) which enforces French as the dominant public language in Quebec. Given that Quebec, despite being surrounded by the Anglosphere, hasn’t ended up like Louisiana or Ireland where French or Irish as the primary native language is a distant memory, suggests that their efforts are successful.
The lot outside The Caboose, punctured with potholes, overlooked a lush meadow lined with cedars. There were picnic tables out there as well as an enormous barbecue, the engine a salvage job done on an abandoned four-stroke lawn mower. Sundays in summer the truculent and hungover Rabbit would turn up at seven A.M. to begin roasting a pig or a couple of shoulders of beef for the community dinner, all you could eat for five bucks, proceeds to The Old Folks Home in Rock Island. The Rabbit was once dismissed for pissing in the fire. "People was looking and it puts them off their feed." He was fired again for falling asleep in the grass after guzzling his umpteenth Molson and failing to notice that the spit hadn't been revolving properly for more than an hour. Then he beat up an inspector from the Commission de la Langue Francaise outside The Thirsty Boot on the 243. According to reports the inspector had ordered The Thirsty Boot to take down their sign and replace it with a French one. "Sure thing," the Rabbit had said, kneeing the inspector in the groin, just to cut him down to his own height before laying into him. "We're gonna put up a pepper sign all right. Only it's gonna read 'De Tirsty Boot'." After that he could do no wrong.
Indeed they may be violating something that the Canadian constitution — a document they never agreed to — describes as a “right”. On the other hand, on the scale of human rights, the right of business owners to publicly display English-only signs is a rather weak one and reasonable people could debate whether it’s fundamental and inalienable.
And it was far more extensive than shop signs, but e.g. using genealogy to decide which children may or may not attend English-language schools. Although even wrt shop signs, you're still omitting important details - forcing shops to put French on signs is not unreasonable per se, but forcing them to make it larger than English even in cases where French is already perfectly visible and legible (i.e. beyond an obvious utilitarian purpose) is just petty revenge.
I also have to remind that the French are themselves colonial settlers in Canada, and that the requirement that French must be the "predominant language" on signs also applies to bilingual French/Native signs outside of official reservations.
In general, just because someone has been oppressed historically doesn't mean that they can't become oppressors themselves when they have the political power to do so. Quebec is not unique in that regard.
And yet, the examples you posted don't really sound like serious human rights violations to me. So perhaps they are being interpreted expansively by Canadian jurisprudence.
> using genealogy to decide which children may or may not attend English-language schools.
Lots of places only let you attend school in the official language. So by letting people who are part of the Anglophone community (i.e., born to Anglophone parents, I guess what you're calling genealogy) attend English-language schools they're making _more_ concessions to the Anglophone minority than is generally accepted as required by human rights. I certainly don't see anyone in the political mainstream claiming that France is committing human rights violations by refusing to set up public schools in languages other than French.
> forcing them to make it larger than English even in cases where French is already perfectly visible and legible (i.e. beyond an obvious utilitarian purpose) is just petty revenge
It is not petty revenge. Well, maybe it is for some hardcore nationalists. But the more charitable interpretation, that French needs a bit of an extra push (beyond just requiring equal exposure as English) in order to withstand the huge pressure from the surrounding Anglosphere, is reasonable.
> I also have to remind that the French are themselves colonial settlers in Canada, and that the requirement that French must be the "predominant language" on signs also applies to bilingual French/Native signs outside of official reservations.
I agree with you here. Indigenous people should be able to protect their culture from the dominant surrounding Franco-Quebec culture just like Franco-Quebecers should be allowed to protect their own from the dominant surrounding Anglosphere, and I unreservedly criticize the Quebec government as hypocrites for not allowing them to.
Speaking more broadly, languages aren't persons and so they don't have rights; people do. Francophone Quebecois should have the right to live in a society in which knowledge of French alone doesn't put one at a significant immediate disadvantage, but I don't think there's a right to not be offended by use of other languages around them, or to force other people to switch their primary language.
In the context of the sign law, regulations on absolute legibility of French text would be sufficient to achieve the former goal, while the actual law that Quebec has is about the latter - that is the whole point of the "extra push". If anything, I would say that that is a good example of hardcore nationalism, actually, because it places the interests of the abstract generalized nation over the interests of concrete people who live there.
My assumptions would be entirely informed from extrapolating from historical context and not knowing anything about German.
So there was probably a lot of linguistic diversity before unification in 1870, then there would have been a standardization effort started by Bismarck (favoring the dialect predominantly spoken in Prussia) which would carry through WW1, would be relaxed during the Weimar republic, would intensify (or turn into something bizarre and Orwellian) in the Nazi era, and then a slight divergence between East and West Germany in the Cold War.
Under this, my rough hypothesis would be that German has actually changed a lot less in the post-WW2 era, especially since the 90s, than it would have in the period before.
Is this roughly how things shook out? I'd be really interested where this is completely wrong.
Some first standardisations started with the beginning of the printed media, especially Luther's bible translation, then later printed grammar manuals. In the 19th century newspapers and publishing had an impact which streamlined the written word, becoming "Standard German" which through these influences is rather descended from central Germany, not Prussia.
AFAIK the "high" in high German doesn’t come from class but from geographical position - high is more upriver than the low countries in the north.
As for oral dialects: There was no concerted campaign against dialects like in France as far as I know; here it is actual more of a class thing. Again the media plays a role: the rise of radio and television in the latter half of the 20th century has a harmonising effect, deemphasising dialects.
Was it though? Historically Low German was spoken in Brandenburg (and the rest of pre 1800s Kingdom of Prussia). Standard German is a High German language closely related to the dialects in Saxony/Thuringia etc. (thanks to Luther) and predates Prussia's status as a major German power by a few centuries or so.
Paradoxically in the 1600s and 1700s Prussia invested a lot of effort into replacing in replacing its local dialects with Standard German (which by modern standards was effectively an entirely foreign language to most people living there. I think technically even Dutch/Flemish might be closer to Standard German than Eastern Low German was).
Austrians, Bavarians etc. didn't really need to do the same since it was already much easier for them to 'learn' Standard German if they needed to (and of course its association with Protestantism played a role initially)
It's a bit like if Scotland replaced Scots with Shakespearean English, then proceeded to takeover the rest of Britain and moved its capital to Edinburgh.
A lot of English vocabulary (technology but also every day life) had an influence on German, especially in Eastern Germany post-reunion. An example: Most people born after 1990 probably invite you to a Geburtstagsparty instead of a Geburtstagsfeier.
Compared to the after-war generations, hyper-local dialects probably faded out as bit as well. If I talk to people from my grandparents generation, there were sometimes difference in terms even though people just lived a few villages apart.
Biggest development I am happy about, is that the capital ẞ is probably becoming official during my life time.
Which as a Brit I found quite interesting - I didn't realise the early language of Britain was Common Brittonic before reading that. It got displaced by English and it's closest descendant in the UK is Welsh.
It's sort of ironic that after Brittonic was largely wiped out by Germanic settlers, we now send back apostrophes to annoy them.
Hermans Wintergarten
EZ.
But idiots add the 's everywhere. And now the grammar gets changed because too many idiots use 's wrong
"Even before the rule clarification, the German orthographic council permitted the use of the possessive apostrophe for the sake of clarity, such as “Andrea’s Bar” to make clear that the owner is called Andrea and not Andreas."
And what's wrong with more clarity?
> ...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
...is as German as it gets. We've made an exception to the rule that also has exceptions.
Either accept it as possible or not, this is just plain stupid.
Grocer's apostrophes annoy me, along with words like "advices" (advice is an abstract noun and can't be plural, like "happiness") and "learnings" (use "lessons" instead).
https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/118379/first-use...
Also datums is the plural of datum when it is used in an engineering sense, which is the most likely place one would still encounter it.
Isn't 'data' already plural, with 'datum' being the singular of the plural 'data'?
None of the coders I've worked with (and I'm in Berlin) have put the s on the end of code.
Quite a few will use "he" to describe inanimate objects, though: "I spilled coffee on the table and now he is wet", that kind of thing.
(This is still better than my German, which is embarassing given how long I've been here)
* Error codes — correct.
* Their personal codes — correct.
* Multiple codes of conduct — correct.
And then computer code is used roughly like the noun 'writing' except you can say writings where appropriate.
- Computer code is seen as a continuous substance or body of work, like "writing" or "music."
- Other types of codes are seen as discrete units or systems.
It's similar to how we say "information" (uncountable) but "facts" (countable), even though they're related concepts.
Hearing someone talk about ‘codes’ has the same weird vibe as when they talk about ‘Legos’.
Also why not pluralise all words? Sources codes.
[1] https://www.lingalot.com/what-languages-did-albert-einstein-...
Edit: cultural possession of language is nonsense, it belongs to all speakers, native and non-native alike. Germans must get used to foreign influence on their language too and Ukrainians should stop fighting Russian language and start writing their own rules for it (what can piss Moscow more?)
One point of debate is that English in the Netherlands has become mostly American English over the last decades due to media influence. While originally "school English" in the Netherlands was British English.
Wether other people will join you in your new usage is yet undetermined but also doesn't really matter. AAVE is the perfect example of this happening large scale in the real world.
A quarter of the population of Canada is in Quebec where the only official language is French and most people would not be considered native English speakers.
informations (French) -> informations (English)
compétences -> competences
Do you also write "he's" and "she's" (as possessive pronouns)? No? Then it's "its".
Obviously
I meant people don't write "he's" as the possessive form of he. Hence they shouldn't write it's as the possessive form of it.
"Who?"
"Xtk'act'sbu"
"Oh no, not the Klingon cosplayer!"
The European Commission has just announced an agreement whereby English will be the official language of the European Union rather than German, which was the other possibility.
As part of the negotiations, the British Government conceded that English spelling had some room for improvement and has accepted a 5- year phase-in plan that would become known as "Euro-English".
In the first year, "s" will replace the soft "c". Sertainly, this will make the sivil servants jump with joy. The hard "c" will be dropped in favour of "k". This should klear up konfusion, and keyboards kan have one less letter.
There will be growing publik enthusiasm in the sekond year when the troublesome "ph" will be replaced with "f". This will make words like fotograf 20% shorter.
In the 3rd year, publik akseptanse of the new spelling kan be expekted to reach the stage where more komplikated changes are possible.
Governments will enkourage the removal of double letters which have always ben a deterent to akurate speling.
Also, al wil agre that the horibl mes of the silent "e" in the languag is disgrasful and it should go away.
By the 4th yer peopl wil be reseptiv to steps such as replasing "th" with "z" and "w" with "v".
During ze fifz yer, ze unesesary "o" kan be dropd from vords kontaining "ou" and after ziz fifz yer, ve vil hav a reil sensi bl riten styl.
Zer vil be no mor trubl or difikultis and evrivun vil find it ezi TU understand ech oza. Ze drem of a united urop vil finali kum tru.
Und efter ze fifz yer, ve vil al be speking German like zey vunted in ze forst plas.
---
source: https://www.reddit.com/r/Jokes/comments/leq19j/english_to_be...
https://faculty.georgetown.edu/jod/texts/twain.html
[edit] Maybe Twain, anyway. The attribution is dubious, but common.
Which is a gem, regardless of authorship. Another related bit associated with Twain is:
“whenever the literary german dives into a sentence, this is the last you are going to see of him till he emerges on the other side of his atlantic with his verb in his mouth.”[0]
Which, as a native English speaker who learned German, I find both amusing and (mostly) correct.
[0] https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/115614-whenever-the-literar...
Edit: Added source reference link.
> A Pan Am 727 flight, waiting for start clearance in Munich, overheard the following:
> Lufthansa (in German): "Ground, what is our start clearance time?"
> Ground (in English): "If you want an answer you must speak in English."
> Lufthansa (in English): "I am a German, flying a German airplane, in Germany. Why must I speak English?"
> Unknown voice from another plane (in a beautiful British accent): "Because you lost the bloody war"
I'm not singling out the Germans, mind you. I smirk also when the French complain of American modes of thought polluting their schools: when municipal bureaucrats let contracts not for demolition but for deconstruction, I say that we have injuries to avenge.
What it means is that you only judge the works by itself. You should not judge it by the standards of the time you read it, nor by the standard of the time it was written, nor by its author life. You judge it by its internal contradictions, its hypocrisy. Your external knowledge should have no impact on how you judge the quality of literary works. How to do that? You find contradictions, and that's what deconstruction is, a mean to find internal contradictions.
How deconstruction is pollution in your mind? Please, tell me.
I'll tell you what happened. People don't read, they parrot idiotic beliefs they heard/read from other idiots who didn't grasp it in the first place, in order to singe knowledge or competency they don't have. It's American scholars who used deconstruction to mean something other than Derrida's definition, and north American idiots who conflated the two, then podcasted their beliefs without reading the man once, and expended their idiocy to other, gullible people who can't read themselves (not their fault, when you work a straining job I understand reading Derrida isn't your priority).
I used the word "polluting" in referring to American thought as influencing French, and that perhaps was a little strong. What I had in mind is mentioned for example in https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-59584125.
> I do think that many of a generation of American scholars found it hard to write or think other than in terms worked out in Paris between the mid-1950s and the early 1970s.
None of the american scholars are postmodern, i'm pretty sure postmodernism died with the first Gulf war, or at least post 9-11 in France, on account on Baudrillard's book. It wasn't even really present in the US because in the US, Habermas and the Frankfurt school were way, way more popular than postmodernism, which was seen as unintelligible and way to complicated. Habermas wrote a virulent critique of postmodernism in "The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity", and that buried Foucault, Lyotard and a bit of Baudrillard in the US.
The fact that idiots who fake their knowledge in north America say that Postmodernism and Frankfurt school Critical theory are the same when they criticize each other so much the best arguments against PM is from Habermas and one of the only common point between all postmodern authors were their rejection of Hegel's dialectic and metanarratives (yeah, when said like this you might think Nietzsche was the first postmodern author) is fun. It is also really postmodern though.
What really grind my gears is that the same type of people who argue against "postmodernism" (that they don't understand) seems to understand how politics are linked with science and authority through at least the language (in my country, the "masks are useless, don't create shortage for nurses"/"masks are usefull, everybody should wear one" was a plain example of that). Which is _exactly_ what Lyotard describe in "the postmodern condition". They _totally_ agree with the single most postmodern book, they just don't know it. Which is fine. What is not fine is holding this opinion on science and politics then criticizing postmodernism for stuff it's not, or just broadly without explaining why. It shows that those shitheads don't know what they are talking about, they either didn't understand, or didn't read (i'm quite certain it's the second). The issue is when gullible, uninformed people believe them. Which was fine when it was americans, but now some French people believe it too and not only i have to fight those misconceptions online, i have to explain to people IRL how gullible they are and how idiotic their favorite anglo podcaster is.
https://www.webpages.uidaho.edu/~sflores/KlagesPostmodernism...
Das/Der/Die is a constant source of frustration. Its never easy to remember.
CZ: ten nůž (masc.) - DE: das Messer (neutr.) - EN: knife
CZ: ten svět (masc.) - DE: die Welt (fem.) - EN: world
CZ: ta žába (fem.) - DE: der Frosch (masc.) - EN: frog
Also, personified Death and rivers seem to be masculine-coded in Germanic languages, and feminine-coded in Slavic ones.
DE:
der Band ... volume (as in "the second volume in a collection of books")
die Band ... group (as in "the Beatles are a group")
das Band ... ribbon
Тази вечер
even though in the greeting "good evening", the old masculine form remains:
добър вечер
Bulgarian in general seems to be the Chad of the Slavic language family :)
In Dutch: De and het, where de is for masculine and feminine, and het for ... I don't even know. And I'm a native Dutch speaker.
Edit: German also has cases: Nominative, accusative, dative and genitive, like Greek.
Latin had a 5th one.
That's what Dutch did. As spoken in most of the Netherlands, Dutch "eliminated" grammatical gender... which is to say it now has two grammatical genders: "both" ("de") and "neither" ("het").
That should solve all spelling problems forever. :)))
Take for example the sentence "Ea ia ia". It's pronounced /ja ja ia/.
Some examples:
* x exists and it's not clear if it's pronounced /ks/ or /gz/.
* e is sometimes pronounced /je/
* h is pronounced as /x/ sometimes and Romanians don't realize this. E.g. hrană is [ˈxra.nə] even though people think they say [ˈhra.nə]
* i is the worst letter in Romanian. It has three pronunciations: /i/, /j/ and /ʲ/. Take for example "copiii". Is it pronounced /kopiji/, /kopiii/, /kopʲji/? Nope, it's /koˈpi.iʲ/ . In the past /j/ and /ʲ/ were written with ĭ making things a bit easier.
* Stress is not written which causes confusions between words like "muie" /mu'je/ (softened) and "muie" /'muje/ (blowjob)
* /ɨ/is written as both î and â based on some stupid rule to preserve România being writen as România instead of Romînia. This is to remind foreigners that we were once Romans, but it's pointless because most foreigners think Romania means "land of Roma (gypsy) people".
I've heard that Serbian in Cyrillic is very phonetic though.
Does the language actually have any minimal pairs where [h] vs [x] makes a difference? Most languages that have a velar fricative have a single phoneme that is either /x/ with [h] as an allophone in some contexts, or /h/ with [x] as an allophone in some contexts. There's no reason to reflect this in spelling if the distinction doesn't actually matter.
> I've heard that Serbian in Cyrillic is very phonetic though.
Serbo-Croatian in all its varieties is almost perfectly phonemic aside from pitch accent. Cyrillic vs Latin doesn't actually matter because even though Latin has more digraphs (lj for љ and nj for њ), they are unambiguous - there's no contrast between "lj" and "l" followed by "j", unlike say Russian where you need to distinguish between "лёд" and "льёт" somehow.
If you want no digraphs at all, Serbian and Montenegrin Cyrillic is still not ideal because "дз" is a digraph. Macedonian fixes it by using the historical Cyrillic "ѕ" [д]зело for /dz/ though, if you want a perfect 1:1 glyph to phoneme mapping.
Cyrillic in general is surprisingly good as a "universal alphabet" if you also consider historical letters and not just the current ones. It has unambiguous glyphs for all labial, alveolar, retroflex, and velar plosives, affricates, and fricatives, a uniform way to represent plain/palatalized/velarized distinction for any consonant, and if you consistently use "ь" for palatalization of consonants you can also repurpose the "soft" vowels to indicate fronting of vowels specifically.
But they are very different, no?) I'd think mistaking "лёд" for "йод" is easier.
In general, what's perceived as "very different" or not is very subjective based on what one is used to. E.g. the distinction between "v" and "w" is very significant in English, but for speakers of many Slavic languages, those are allophones, and when they learn English they have trouble using them correctly.
Same for `chuáng` 床（） vs `chuán` （船）。
Russian has terminal de-voicing; so /d/ softens to a /t/, hence сад = /sat/. (Sort of; actually it's something in between, but the shift is noticable).
And /l/ palatizes (becomes /lj/) before both е and ё, as in самолёт. (Actually the /j/ is built into ё of course, but somehow it seems helpful to recognize the commonality of the sounds when realized after /l/ - basically е becomes more yoff-like).
The vowel might differ (one may be more fronted or rounded than the other), but that tends to vary among speakers anyway.
Russian has a whole suite of secondary rules like this. Ukrainian by contrast is much more phonetic. But unlike English, at least Russian has a system.
What you usually want is that the writing system be phonemic, i.e. that there is a 1:1 correspondence between phonemes (meaningfully distinctive sound units) and characters. Unfortunately, languages evolve, so even if your writing systems starts out as more or less phonemic, over time the sounds of the language will drift and inertia will usually keep the writing system not fully in sync with these changes. This is particularly bad in the case of English, where there's never been a proper spelling reform accounting for the corresponding sound changes.
J`st ch`nge `m t` di`cr`t'c m`rks, `nd `t's st`ll p`rf`ctl` l`g`ble
Seriously, who cares that some organizational body in Germany has an issue with the English language? :)