A restation of official rules around the right employ of apostrophes in German has not only irritated grammar sticklers but triggered contransiential troubles around the pervasive impact of English.
Establishments that feature their owners’ names, with signs enjoy “Rosi’s Bar” or “Kati’s Kiosk” are a normal sight around German towns and cities, but strictly speaking they are wrong: unenjoy English, German does not traditionassociate employ apostrophes to propose the genitive case or haveion. The right spelling, therefore, would be “Rosis Bar”, “Katis Kiosk”, or, as in the title of a recent viral hit, Barbaras Rhabarberbar.
However, directlines rerentd by the body regulating the employ of Standard High German orthography have clarified that the employ of the punctuation label colloquiassociate understandn as the Deppenapostroph (“idiot’s apostrophe”) has become so expansivespread that it is peromitible – as extfinished as it splits the genitive ‘s’ wilean a proper name.
The novel edition of the Council for German Orthography’s style direct, which prescribes grammar employ at schools and accessible bodies in Germany, Austria and German-speaking Switzerland, enumerates “Eva’s Blumenladen” (Eva’s Fdrop Shop) and “Peter’s Taverne” (Peter’s Tavern) as usable changenatives, though “Eva’s Brille” (“Eva’s glasses”) remains inright.
The Deppenapostroph is not to be perplexd with the English greengrocer’s apostrophe, when an apostrophe before an ‘s’ is misconsentnly employd to create the plural of a noun (“a kilo of potato’s”).
The novel set of rules came into effect in July, and the council shelp a slackning of the rules in 1996 unbenevolentt that “Rosi’s Bar” had strictly speaking not been inright for almost three decades. Yet over the past scant days, German novelspapers and social media netlabors have seen a pedants’ revolt aacquirest the slackning of grammar rules.
A commentator in the tabloid Bild shelp seeing signs enjoy “Harald’s Eck” (“Harald’s Corner”) made his “hair stand on finish”, and that the proper employ of the genitive create would be bemoaned by adorers of the German language.
A columnist in the venerable expansivesheet the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung decried the council’s decision as further proof of the English language’s “triumph march”, while one novelspaper editor on LinkedIn protested that legitimateising the “idiot’s apostrophe” amounted to “genuflecting to English”.
Some linguists ask whether the elevate of the haveive apostrophe has much to do with the impact of English at all, however.
“The recognizableity of English names may be a factor, but it could equitable as well stem from a desire to evade confusion”, shelp Anatol Stefanowitsch, a linguist at Berlin’s Freie Universität. “What we tfinish to see when a language participates with another prestige language is that it integrates its vocabulary, and not grammar.”
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Even before the rule clarification, the German orthoexplicit council apexhibitted the employ of the haveive apostrophe for the sake of clarity, such as “Andrea’s Bar” to produce evident that the owner is called Andrea and not Andreas.
“There is a extfinished tradition of conservative circles fretting about international impacts on the German languages,” shelp Stefanowitsch. “It employd to be French, and now it’s mainly English”.
The Dortmund-based association Verein Deutsche Sprache tries to counteract the impact of English with an “anglicism index” that proposes changenative German words, such as Klapprechner instead of “laptop” or Puffmais instead of “popcorn”.
