Back in 2006 I reported on “the insensate rage unleashed in language-loving Germans by the humble apostrophe”; now Philip Oltermann in the Guardian tells us those language-loving Germans are going to have to suck it up:
A relaxation of official rules around the correct use of apostrophes in German has not only irritated grammar sticklers but triggered existential fears around the pervasive influence of English.
Establishments that feature their owners’ names, with signs like “Rosi’s Bar” or “Kati’s Kiosk” are a common sight around German towns and cities, but strictly speaking they are wrong: unlike English, German does not traditionally use apostrophes to indicate the genitive case or possession. The correct spelling, therefore, would be “Rosis Bar”, “Katis Kiosk”, or, as in the title of a recent viral hit, Barbaras Rhabarberbar.
However, guidelines issued by the body regulating the use of Standard High German orthography have clarified that the use of the punctuation mark colloquially known as the Deppenapostroph (“idiot’s apostrophe”) has become so widespread that it is permissible – as long as it separates the genitive ‘s’ within a proper name.
The new edition of the Council for German Orthography’s style guide, which prescribes grammar use at schools and public bodies in Germany, Austria and German-speaking Switzerland, 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. […]
“There is a long tradition of conservative circles fretting about international influences on the German languages,” said Stefanowitsch. “It used to be French, and now it’s mainly English”. The Dortmund-based association Verein Deutsche Sprache tries to counteract the influence of English with an “anglicism index” that proposes alternative German words, such as Klapprechner instead of “laptop” or Puffmais instead of “popcorn”.
Barbaras Rhabarberbar turned up here earlier this year; I’m not sure why “Eva’s Blumenladen” is OK but “Eva’s Brille” isn’t, unless it’s only on signs that you can get away with such horrors. Thanks, Trevor, Nick, and Bonnie!
French used to influence a small segment.
These books
https://www.ggverlag.at/kollektion/simple-und-easy
are for small children.
(I do think that everyone should panic and stop promotion of English:) English globally, Russian within Russia. For the same reason. I like language diversity)
“Eva’s Blumenladen” is the name of a store. “Eva’s Brille” means Eva’s glasses. Common nouns are capitalized in German.
I know that, but it’s not obvious from the article that the law only applies to signs: “guidelines issued by the body regulating the use of Standard High German orthography have clarified that the use of the punctuation mark colloquially known as the Deppenapostroph […] has become so widespread that it is permissible – as long as it separates the genitive ‘s’ within a proper name.”
I’m not sure why “Eva’s Blumenladen” is OK but “Eva’s Brille” isn’t, unless it’s only on signs that you can get away with such horrors.
“Evas Klobrillen” is OK for a sanitary appliance store (a happier name than Bad Design). Also “Evas Grill”. However, cosmopolitan sign-readers might find ambiguity in “Evas Glattbutt” (we’re talking brill here).
I think ‘within a proper name’ means ‘inside the name of (e.g.) a shop’, rather than inside the person’s name. So it’s ok to write down the name of the shop, but not to use an apostrophe in an ordinary possessive phrase.
So the apostrophe is still an error, but it’s not wrong to quote correctly a name that contains an erroneous apostrophe. I guess that can be a useful clarification.
Once again I am glad I decided to keep German at a respectful distance.
Respekt!
Yallah!
English style guides differ on when to preserve nonstandard punctuation in proper names. Apostrophes and hyphens tend to get kept, more unusual symbols not so much. en.wikipedia Category:Redirects from stylizations has some interesting relevant data.
Plenty of advertising and commercial signage in Germany has bits of English in it. It’s not Quebec; it’s not illegal to use a language other than German in that context. Maybe sometimes hard to tell whether what you’re seeing is a bit of English or a bit of German with English-like punctuation patterns? Although of course there’s still the risk of “false friends.” I earlier today (I am briefly in Germany) saw a contractor’s van parked outside a residential property (presumably a customer) and the van indicated that the name of the business was “BadConcept.” Which would not go over well with an Anglophone customer base but in German of course just means “BathConcept” and the photos seemed to show a lady in a robe that she was about to take off to enjoy a soak in the new tub in the newly-restyled Badezimmer the contractor had done for her.
I look forward to the introduction of the grocer’s apostrophe in German: Apfel’n, Kartoffel’n and so on.
Apfel’n
What is that supposed to be?
@hans
David L took apple’s (grocer’s apostrophe) and tried to use the same word, assuming incorrectly the plural was with n instead of umlaut. Maybe change fruit and try Apfelsine’n?
Jen:
I think ‘within a proper name’ means ‘inside the name of (e.g.) a shop’, rather than inside the person’s name.
Yes, of course. And that’s how it’s expressed in the original (Amtliches Regelwerk der deutschen Rechtschreibung: Regeln und Wörterverzeichnis):
Not as the Guardian carelessly puts it: “as long as it separates the genitive ‘s’ within a proper name”.
By trickery one could trip that ruling up, of course. Here’s one way: If a film were called Eva’s Mother, that whole construction is a proper name – and there’s no issue, in English. But in German? The Regelwerk would seem to allow the film to be called Eva’s Mutter, but we can doubt that this is the intention.
I first read the title as dysapostrophism. That’s fine too.
I first read the title as dysapostrophism. That’s fine too.
Which title do you mean? What’s fine too, along with what?
Incidentally, here are some pairs of German and English names, each for the same film:
Wallers letzter Gang
Waller’s Last Trip
Huies Predigt
Huie’s Sermon
Ediths Tagebuch
Edith’s Diary
Emmas Glück
Emma’s Bliss
Abrahams Gold
Abraham’s Gold
The important feature in these is that the item relevantly referred to with the NP Abrahams Gold (for example) is not gold at all: it’s a film. Contrast Evas Mutter and Peters Taverne (or Peter’s Taverne) as given above, where the items referred to are indeed a mother and a tavern. Also, if the English name for a film were Who Broke Eva’s Glasses? the Regelwerk would not want to be licensing as the German title Wer hat Eva’s Brille kaputt gemacht? – even though that is a proper name for a film.
Some of the signs with genitive apostrophes in them are older than orthography – in the 19th century the practice was sometimes pretty common.
It doesn’t matter anyway. Nobody has the authority to take a sign down because it’s misspelled.
In Russian WP lovers of proper use of punctiation won the battle against Khoi-San transcriptions:) With, as I complained, the help of linguists.
I’m afraid, they are not going to even consider attacking iPhone.
The genitive-s apostrophe has been in (occasional) use in German for centuries. Random example: here.
When orthography regulation went all-in in the 20th century, it was deprecated, but never went away completely.
I’m certain that English usage has had a reinforcing effect.
The ‘new’ orthography rules have acknowledged this since 1996.
So this is really non-news. Once again, I just don’t get how the media industry functions.
Apfel’n
Yeah, I misremembered the plural. I would make an excellent German greengrocer.
A’¨pfel
LLog is on it; the earliest mentioned examples are from the mid-17th century, not just the 19th.
Excellent.
Noetica: the title of the blog. I read Deppenapostroph as dysapostrophism, and I like my accidental neologism.
I read it so too.
Which tells something interesting, because
Deppen[*********]
Dys[*********]ism
Anyway, German had it coming. English capitalized nouns for a couple of centuries or so.
English never did that. Things like the Declaration of Independence and the big-C Constitution instead show Trump-like capitalization for emphasis; they all leave a few nouns in lowercase.
German never seems to have had that, BTW; to the best of my knowledge it had a linear increase from the names of princes to all nouns, for slowly broadening definitions of “noun”.
Benjamin Franklin:
“In examining the English books that were printed between the restoration and the accession of George the Second, we may observe, that all substantives were begun with a capital, in which we imitated our mother tongue, the German. This was more particularly useful to those who were not well acquainted with the English, there being such a prodigious number of our words that are both verbs and substantives, and spelt in the same manner, though often accented differently in pronunciation. This method has, by the fancy of printers, of late years, been entirely laid aside; from an idea, that suppressing the capitals shews the character to greater advantage; those letters, prominent above the line, disturbing its even, regular appearance.”
(Added the final word and some original italics to your quote — hope you don’t mind.)
Just as I was polishing off a beef about missing words ! But the race is not to the swift, as I’m sure you’ve heard.
the race is not to the swift
Tell that to Taylor.
Y:
I read Deppenapostroph as dysapostrophism, and I like my accidental neologism.
Ah, you meant the first word of the title. Alles klar. “What’s diastrophism got to do with it?” I thought.
Oh. Interesting.
I have done some digging:
• the apostrophe was already required in one case (for a proper name ending in a sibilant: Carlos’ Blumenladen) and optional in another case (to mark where a morpheme boundary is if that would otherwise be unclear: Carlo’s Blumenladen). The new rule now permits the apostrophe in other cases (Eva’s Blumenladen). Carlos already had to put an apostrophe in the name of his shop and Carlo could also choose to do that. Now Eva can choose to do so too.
• the wording of the new rule lacks clarity. It doesn’t explain what a crucial term (die Gesamtkonstruktion, ‘the whole construction’) refers to. And it uses the other crucial term (Eigenname, ‘proper noun’) twice, without explaining that they refer to 2 different things. Normal people with little explicit knowledge about language won’t understand what is intended. Unfortunately, the examples included are just lists with no link back to the rules. The examples lack signposts back to the crucial terms and do not mention important background assumptions that drive the conclusions in each case. So, the examples don’t compensate for the lack of clarity in the rule itself.
• the recently blessed Eva’s Blumenladen is just one sub-type of the Deppenapostroph (‘idiot’s apostrophe’): the genitive apostrophe. There are at least four other types: plural apostrophe; apostrophe of ‘false’ omission; apostrophes in verb forms and apparently random apostrophes. The rules still do not permit those other four types, nor do they permit other sub-types of the genitive apostrophe.
• the new rules rewrite the description of the rules that already existed. The rewrite is not noticeably clearer and in some respects it is worse.
• unacceptably, no list is available of what has changed.
• the body that issued these rules is an inter-governmental body. The rules are intended for government organisations and schools, but do not otherwise affect the public directly. It is for the individual governments to decide when the new rules come into force, and how the transition will work.
I have written more about this at https://languagemiscellany.com/2024/10/eva-can-now-put-an-apostrophe-in-the-name-of-her-shop/
Oh, I didn’t even know that.
(…This case is also not all that unclear. Blumenladen is not a known last name.)
But without the apostrophe, couldn’t it be taken as the Blumenladen owned by Carlos?
“insensate rage” – as a fan of Afrikaans I will consider using his genitive in English:)
No; that would be Carlos’ Blumenladen with an apostrophe afterwards.
I’ve long thought the English his genitive was fake. Deep down, the Wikipedia article agrees:
Oh, I thought you were talking about just not using apostrophes.
But couldn’t a shop have a name that’s not a possessive, so Carlos Blumenladen is a possibility, named after Carlos, just as Schmidt Blumenladen would be?
Fretting about whether and where to put an apostrophe in Carlos Blumenladen would be avoided here by putting the proper name last, as in Restaurant Carlos in Cologne. That’s done a lot. It’s the standard for small firms whose names contain the proprietor’s family name, quite apart from apostrophe questions.
Schmidt Blumenladen is not correct, see Schmidt’s Backstübchen in Marienheide.
“deep down” – I disagree: if WP is right, it was understood by at least some speakers as his.
Some of them updated the spelling.
Not really possible. What does occur (quite often, actually) is Blumen Schmidt.
The construction in the title Purchas His Pilgrimage — what is that? A learned spelling? When was that in vogue?
Yes – by “fake” I mean “reanalysis”. 🙂 They heard /ɪz/ and reinterpreted it as his, and then some went on to use her & their accordingly – in writing.
An example of the very “his genitive” we’ve been talking about: Purchas’s pilgrimage with a reanalysis spelled out.
Ah, then I agree:)
“Reanalysis” sounds more descriptivist, it does not rely on any notion of “correctness” other than known to 1 y.o. baby. One of mechanisms of language change.
“Hypercorrection” relies on red-ink correctness and is more like “those semiliterate bastards spoiled our beloved latinism! Who let them in the library? Such types should not be allowed to read, their place is at the plough or dairy!” *
At least it relies on the idea that there is a “natural” way of saying/writting it (happens to be correct), and a “counter-intuitive” way (incorrectly thought to be correct because everything correct must be unnatural). I don’t think such a contrast is applicable to any reanalysis. People reanalyse naturally:)
“in writing.” – actually WP says that they “were … saying ‘his’ … by hypercorrection”
* I remember, JWB wrote something like that hypercorrection hints on snobbery on the part of hypercorrecting people. I think not necessarily.
But snobbery is possible for both sides.
And what matters is that this reanalysis must have happened towards something that feels not too unnatural and…. resulted in a construction widely used in Low German/Dutch dialects/vernacular.
Ah, so there are two periods!
1200-1500s his for both genders/numbers, often spelled without h-.
After that, mostly for m sg, but sometimes f and pl and then the form agrees in gender/number.
I’m not sure if the proportion of m sg examples is larger since 1500s and how much if so.
Yes, but I don’t think that’s testable; ‘s and unstressed his were most likely both /ɪz/ at the time, so “a distinction without a difference” may be the best description of the spoken situation.
FWIW, dialectal Danish has manden hans hat for standard mandens hat, where there is no suggestion that hans has ever been lenited to anything like -s. I think I’ve seem a similar claim for der Mann sein Hut in German; just because you can claim that the man his hat is an eggcorning of the man’s hat doesn’t mean you have to; even absent phonetic similarity it’s a natural corrective measure if you’re losing the inherited genetive. Even more so, I feel, if the inherited genetive was unpredictable and you’ve already done away with all the other cases, like English and Danish — both standards did settle on a universal -s clitic, though.
(It is a clitic in current Danish too, as witness Karen og Kirstens børn or borgmesteren i Køges underskrift).
just because you can claim that the man his hat is an eggcorning of the man’s hat doesn’t mean you have to; even absent phonetic similarity it’s a natural corrective measure if you’re losing the inherited genetive.
An excellent point that I will try to keep in mind.
Dem, rather: Der Dativ ist dem Genitiv sein Tod.
Absolutely. The trick here is that invariant his shows up centuries before agreement (his, her, their) in English but isn’t known to have ever occurred elsewhere.
Right, the dative is stone dead in Danish (and all the dialects, AFAIR) so I saw nothing wrong with the nominative there, but of course it’s Hut that takes case according to which argument in the phrase it is. Dative has form from Latin, (marī petasus est ?), does the construction or the case selection actually go back even further?
If they really said/wrote the men his hat in the early stages, then obviously there’s not just a possessive pronoun happening. (But personal pronouns were different back then; I have never had enough Middle English to know what they were, even less the possessive forms, so for all I know they all sounded like his/-iz).
“dialectal Danish has”
@Lars, aha! Thank you. WP relies on a book (Genitives in Early English) and an article (The Early English ‘his Genitives’ from a Germanic Perspective) by Cynthia Allen and the article has “…in other Germanic varieties, including modern colloquial German and Dutch, and in Norwegian varieties”
I wondered what about Danish….