English influence on German spelling

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Below is a guest post by Andreas Stolcke.


This is an item maybe worthy of a note on Language Log — Philip Oltermann, "Germans decry influence of English as ‘idiot’s apostrophe’ gets official approval", The Guardian 10/7/2024:

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.

I couldn't believe they did this, and looked up the new rule. The relevant part is

2. Der Apostroph steht zur Verdeutlichung der Grundform eines Personennamens vor einer Endung:

    • gelegentlich vor dem Genitiv-s, sofern der Personenname mit dem folgenden Substantiv zusammen einen Eigennamen (z. B. Firmen namen) bildet ‹§ 80 E1›;

Zum Beispiel:

    • Willi’s Biomarkt
    • Andrea’s Kiosk (hier auch verdeutlichend zur Unterscheidung vom männlichen Vornamen Andreas)
    • Aber nur: Willis Karotten, Andreas Ware
    • vor der Adjektivendung -sch ‹§ 62, § 80 (2)›.

Zum Beispiel:

    • die Grimm’schen Märchen (neben: die grimmschen Märchen), der Ohm’sche Widerstand (neben: der ohmsche Wider stand)

2. The apostrophe stands for clarifying the base form of a person name before a suffix:

    • occasionally before the genitive -s, as long as the person name together with the following noun forms a proper name (e.g., of a company)

For example:

      • Willi's Biomarkt
      • Andrea's Kiosk (here also to differentiate from the male given name "Andreas")
      • but only: Willis Karotten, Andreas Ware
        [These cases require the forms without apostrophe, because the whole phrase is not a proper name]
    • before the adjectival suffix -sche

For example:

      • Grimm's fairy tales, Ohm's resistance

Are you aware of other languages (e.g., English) where spelling or punctuation rules are specifically different for named entities?  Of course I recognize that, being names, their spelling is always de facto less regulated and often idiosyncratic.  But, Germans being rule-loving folks, they come up with a rule for when the rule has an exception ;-).

BTW, another area where I noticed English having exerted definite influence on German is in the segmentation of noun compounds.   Unlike in English, in German you traditionally must either join or hyphenate compounds.  However, recently I'm noticing more and more simple juxtaposition (separated by spaces) of nouns to form compounds.  So where you would traditionally write

Taylor-Swift-Konzert

you now occasionally see

Taylor Swift Konzert

A more extreme example is  "Tailor Swift Eras Tour Kleidung" —

Anecdotally, I find this often involves English borrowings or proper names, as you might expect.

Language evolving …


Above is a guest post by Andreas Stolcke.

A few of our many past posts about apostrophe usage in English:

"A soul candidly acknowleging it's fault", 6/9/2004
"Angry linguistic mobs with torches", 4/16/2008
"'Grammar vigilantes' brought to justice", 8/22/2008
"Apostropocalypse Now", 1/15/2012
"Apostropocalypse again", 12/1/2019

And a couple about spaces, hyphens, and nil:

"Prescriptivism and national security", 10/4/2005
"Level(-)headedness", 3/3/2010

Update — Andreas explains the "neben" parentheses in the quoted section of the new rule:

die Grimm’schen Märchen (neben: die grimmschen Märchen), der Ohm’sche Widerstand (neben: der ohmsche Wider stand)
The meaning is identical to the version with apostrophes and capitalized names. Unlike in English (Whorf > Whorfian), when you derive an adjective from a name, you don't keep the capitalization of the name.  It becomes lower-case, like all adjectives in German.  So as in the possessive cases, the apostrophe enables you to preserve the original spelling (and recognizability) of the underlying name.
Update #2 — See "English is innocent", 10/10/2024.



22 Comments

  1. Jason said,

    October 9, 2024 @ 5:12 am

    In English, of course, the apostrophe sets off the possessive clinic ' 's', which is quite distinct from English's "Genitive". No such distinction exists for German possessive, making this decision utterly baffling to me. I can't understand what would make native speakers to emulate English in this regard, other than as a fashion statement. Are Germans now such weebs for English as this?

  2. Mark Liberman said,

    October 9, 2024 @ 5:32 am

    @Jason:In English, of course, the apostrophe sets off the possessive clinic ' 's', which is quite distinct from English's "Genitive".

    This comment is puzzling as well as rude. We can assume that "clinic" is a typo for "clitic" — but apostrophe s is widely described as "genitive" as well as "possessive", and derives historically from the masculine and neuter genitive ending in Old English.

  3. Jason said,

    October 9, 2024 @ 6:21 am

    "Clinic" is my phone's autocorrect running amok, of course. I do of course mean "clitic", and as for the possessive being regarded as a genitive, it depends on which authority you accept. I mean whatever is the distinction that exists between predicate "genitives" and possessive "genitives," in English, which is a clear distinction in English but is not in German.

  4. Andrew Taylor said,

    October 9, 2024 @ 6:25 am

    I like the bossy italicisation of "Aber nur.." ("but only…"). "We'll allow Willi’s Biomarkt, but don't you _dare_ write .Willi's Karotten"

  5. Thomas said,

    October 9, 2024 @ 6:42 am

    The segmentation of noun compounds in German is sometimes denoted as “Deppen Leerzeichen” (idiots' blank), where the name already contains the error itself.

  6. AntC said,

    October 9, 2024 @ 7:09 am

    2. The apostrophe stands for clarifying the base form of a person name before a suffix:
    [And an example includes the possible ambiguity arising from 'Andrea[s]' — presumably close to our guest poster's concern.]

    Are you aware of other languages (e.g., English) where spelling or punctuation rules are specifically different for named entities?

    Yes, English precisely. Jesus' not Jesus's — at least if that counts as English; the pronunciation also is uncommon. But I readily admit to nervous cluelessness as to the exact spelling rules …

    A bar owned by Jo; a bar owned by Joss; a bar owned by two named Jo; by two named Joss; jointly by a Jo and a Joss — and does the apostrophising vary depending which is named first?

    LLog seems an ideal place to seek feedback on current practice vs. the rules my English master would pronounce 50 years('?) ago.

  7. Yuval said,

    October 9, 2024 @ 7:22 am

    @AntC: add to that capitalization, which surely qualify as a spelling rule?

  8. coalescedstardust said,

    October 9, 2024 @ 7:26 am

    Are you aware of other languages (e.g., English) where spelling or punctuation rules are specifically different for named entities?

    Turkish! In Turkish, an apostrophe is used to separate proper names, but not any other word, from inflectional endings.

  9. AntC said,

    October 9, 2024 @ 7:57 am

    @Yuval indeed! Capitalisation also required at the start of a sentence. So how about a Proper Name spelled the same as a common word, appearing at sentence-first: possessive 's vs clitic 's?

    May's a-commin' in. May May take the stage? May's entrance was stately.

  10. AntC said,

    October 9, 2024 @ 8:40 am

    … appearing at sentence-first: possessive 's vs clitic 's?

    There's an Abbott & Costello routine "Who's on first?" that's alleged to be hilarious.

    They toured it round New Zealand. Firstly baseball is not a thing, so "X's on" means nothing — cricket has "X is at the wicket/is (opening the) batting"; secondly Hugh or Hughey is not a very common name and is anyway pronounced with a palatal so doesn't sound like the pronoun.

    A & C trooped off stage to the sound of their own footsteps. The story is recounted to this day as a warning to 'international' acts — especially those that can't tell NZ from Aus.

  11. Terry K. said,

    October 9, 2024 @ 8:42 am

    I've seen examples of 's being used in business names in Spanish speaking countries. There's nothing similar within Spanish. So I'm inclined to see it similarly in the examples here in German, borrowing a construction for use in business names, rather than as writing German different. It just happens that in German the borrowed construction is very similar to the native construction.

  12. Terry K. said,

    October 9, 2024 @ 8:48 am

    Where does Hugh sound like who? I'm American and have never encountered that. Hugh is pronounced Hyoo (/hju/) "Who" doesn't sound like any existing familiar name (though it does sound like Hu). It doesn't need to for the routine to work.

  13. C Baker said,

    October 9, 2024 @ 9:04 am

    They toured it round New Zealand. Firstly baseball is not a thing, so "X's on" means nothing — cricket has "X is at the wicket/is (opening the) batting"; secondly Hugh or Hughey is not a very common name and is anyway pronounced with a palatal so doesn't sound like the pronoun.

    I always assumed that this the last name Hu, since we typically refer to baseball players by their last name anyway.

    And the rest of the names aren't even pretending to be names, unless you really think that anybody in America is named "I don't know".

    If people in New Zealand really think that they're supposed to be talking about some guy named Hugh and some other men named "Tomorrow", "Today", and "Because" then I really don't think Abbott and Costello can be blamed for the joke not landing.

    Incidentally, Abbot and Costello didn't invent the routine. It was already in wide circulation in the USA and the UK when they adapted it.

  14. Rodger C said,

    October 9, 2024 @ 10:12 am

    I distinctly remember, from photos taken many decades ago, this apostrophe being used in signage with proper names in Germany. Perhaps it dropped out of use (as something optional) and come back again. Can anyone here find visual evidence?

  15. Lars said,

    October 9, 2024 @ 2:47 pm

    The Danish adaptation of "Who's on first?" that I've seen uses members of a band instead. Who plays the drums, etc. Avoids the baseball issue entirely.

  16. Seonachan said,

    October 9, 2024 @ 3:32 pm

    In the setup to the Who's on First routine, Abbott specifically mentions the "peculiar" nicknames players have. The first baseman is Who, not Hu or Hugh.

  17. Julian Hook said,

    October 9, 2024 @ 5:16 pm

    For a spelling rule that works differently for names, how about the plurals of names ending with y? We write cities, puppies, burglaries—but it's Kennedys, not Kennedies.

  18. AntC said,

    October 9, 2024 @ 9:03 pm

    last name Hu, since we typically refer to baseball players by their last name anyway.

    Thank you @CB. 'Hu' as a last name wouldn't land any better. (I got this tale frome someone who was in the audience.) NZers' ignorance of baseball is absolute to this day. NZ's Chinese community at the time was tiny and almost invisible, George Formby's Mr. Wu notwithstanding.

    I don't see using band names is any better. It's always *The* Who, for obvious reasons; equally obviously there's no even counter-counter band named "I don't know".

    The setup doesn't work. Continuing longer and louder doesn't persuade me it's anything but feeble and contrived.

  19. J.W. Brewer said,

    October 10, 2024 @ 12:31 am

    AFAIK, Germany doesn't forbid the use of English in signage or advertising the way Quebec does. I'm in Germany on vacation right now and random bits of English pop up in otherwise German-language tv ads. And "Rosi's Bar" is perfectly good English. How would one even know it whether it was "supposed to be" English or (until just now) illicitly-punctuated German? I'm not really denying that "Bar" has become a German noun, but it's a loanword from English that they couldn't even be bothered to nativize by modestly tweaking the spelling. Admittedly "Rosi" rather than "Rosie" (or "Rosy") is a bit more Teutonic but you could certainly go by that name in an Anglophone nation if you wanted to.

  20. Hallo said,

    October 10, 2024 @ 3:05 pm

    Would be interesting if any native slavic language speaker could comment on whether this happens in their language

  21. David Marjanović said,

    October 15, 2024 @ 9:25 am

    any native slavic language speaker

    I'm not one (anymore), but… how could it? Slavic genitives never end in -s.

  22. Peter Clark said,

    October 20, 2024 @ 6:11 am

    The 2018 edition of the rules required or permitted the apostrophe in only two cases:
    • to mark a morpheme boundary that would otherwise be unclear; or
    • to mark the omission of one or more letters.

    The newly legitimised use of the apostrophe doesn’t fit into either of the existing cases. The decision to legitimise the apostrophe in this type of case codifies observed practice. It does so by creating a new category rather than by trying to squeeze this use into one of the existing two categories.

    The new rule relates to the genitive suffix -s attached to a proper noun that modifies another proper noun. In fact, the apostrophe was already required in one case of this kind (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.

    I have written more about this at https://languagemiscellany.com/2024/10/eva-can-now-put-an-apostrophe-in-the-name-of-her-shop/

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